


The Achilles Suite

by tactfulGnostalgic



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Dark Academia, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 00:53:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21758689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: "Yes, I had been to Winterfell before."
Relationships: Jon Snow & Starks, Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome! This premise of this fic is kind of hard to pitch, but I’ll just say for our purposes that it’s _Brideshead Revisited_ meets _The Secret History._ If you haven’t read either of those books, it’s a dark academia AU set in Oxford in the 1920s. However, much of the geography, names, and historical facts have been rearranged in a mashup with the Game of Thrones universe.
> 
> As the theme might suggest, this fic WILL be going dark places. Not dark in the weird sense, but in the classical, tragic sense. (Think ‘The Iliad,’ not ‘Oedipus Rex.’) There will be some potentially disturbing imagery later on. Mind the tags.
> 
> One last thing: some of the ages in this fic have been bent to suit the needs of the story. The Lannister twins have been aged down considerably (about a generation, to be precise), while age gaps between the Stark siblings have been condensed.
> 
> Whew! Now that’s out of the way, we can get to the good stuff. Without further ado, I present:

_“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”_

—Evelyn Waugh, _Brideshead Revisited_

* * *

It was late afternoon and the sun was settling her red skirts over the west by the time I reached ‘C’ company lines. We had been walking for the better part of the day, moving in a dead march northwest, and although they were good men and issued not one murmur of complaint, I knew they were tired. 

Our boots left slush-filled tracks in the snow. The melt had been a long time coming, but now a rush of weeping from the icicles that bracketed tree branches and a certain softness underfoot promised that spring would soon be upon us. It could not come sooner for the men of ‘C’ company. We had been marching through the heart of the Northlands, where winter rendered the land all but unsuitable for human life. I had the good luck of knowing the area, and could offer the occasional bit of useful data — a shortcut through some familiar thatch of woods, or a hidden bridge left unmarked on our maps — but even a better seasoned captain than I could not have protected his soldiers from what lay behind us. We dug many a shallow grave that winter.

My lieutenant, a good-natured man by the name of Samwell Tarly, marched beside me at the fore of the company. “Many in good spirits today,” he remarked brightly. “Scouts say there’s shelter ahead.”

I knew of what area he spoke. Nevertheless, I did not reveal myself. “What shelter?”

“Oh, big old place. Empty castle, looks like. One of them old family houses, like the rich gentlefolk used to keep — before the war, of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed.

“Plenty of room for the whole company to fit in there, as the scouts tell it. Maybe more. Apparently the place is giant. Could send a wire to ‘A’ company and have them come down join us.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

We trudged on.

I was thirty-nine. At that point I had spent the better part of my life in the armed forces, from my very boyhood to this stretch of bloody madness which was the present war. It would be my last year in the army, I already knew. I had tired of the cold and threadbare life that we shared. Some say that there is brotherhood in war, but I have never found it so; my own fleeting brush with brotherhood occurred not among soldiers, but with a group altogether apart from this or any other world.

It was nearly dusk by the time we reached the encampment of which Tarly’s scout had spoke. Through the dim light I could hardly make out the shape of the old castle, which was composed of a vast stronghold and several circular towers with slanted roofs. A flower of red trees rose from the southern edge of the estate, encircled by a stone fence.

The scout lead us up the trail to the front gates, across a long and barren snow-field where not even grass populated the cold earth. The horizon was a smear of brown and black, speckled with the ash-gray of dirty snow, and all around us whorls of sleet nipped and stung our faces.

Tarly whistled. “What a beauty,” he marveled. “You know, my own family’s got a place, but she’s nothing like that.”

“Nothing is,” I said. Tarly glanced questioningly at me from the corner of his eye, but I did not speak further, and he knew well enough not to inquire.

“Olly,” I called. 

The scout spun around and snapped a crisp salute. “Sir!”

“What’s this place called?”

He told me. I closed my eyes as the words fell on my ears, and for a moment all noise ceased: all pain and cold vanished, and all the wear of my nearly forty years peeled away like dust under a bath of warm water. The world spun; the earth turned green, the sky flushed blue, and I heard a chorus of voices reach from within the gates, laughing and calling my name.

Another scout came hurrying up to meet us, tossing out somewhat haphazard salutes to me and Tarly, in turn. “Captain, sir,” he barked. “The gates are unlocked. Whoever left it didn’t secure the place. We can enter through the main doors and bunk in the stronghold.”

“Thank you, Marsh,” Tarly said grandly, and then spoke to me: “The stronghold might be a bit drafty, if you want my opinion, but they’ve this queer thing they’ve got set up to the south. There’s sort of a private sept attached. Incredibly ornate, but entirely out of character. It’s dedicated to the Seven, and everyone knows they serve the Old Gods up here.” He gave a short laugh. “You never saw such a thing, sir.”

“Yes, I have, Lieutenant.”

At this Tarly’s curiosity could not possibly be repressed. He opened his mouth to ask, and I answered curtly: “I’ve been here before.”

“Oh,” he exclaimed. “Sorry, sir. You know all about it, then.”

I did. I heard the name again, murmured by some wanton figment of my imagination. It was a secret, a promise, a prayer.

Yes, I had been to Winterfell before.


	2. Chapter 2

_Whither is fled the visionary gleam?  
_ _Where is it now, the glory and the dream?_

— William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

* * *

Of all the students that flocked to Oxford University that fateful Michaelmas, my path there was perhaps the most circuitous. The school, as you know, has a penchant for attracting the sons and daughters of dignified, respectable people, usually with names that bear the weight of their reputations, and I had no such backing. In fact, I had almost the antithesis: whereas my peers’ luggage tags were embossed with the gleaming, haughty characters of Baratheon, Tyrell, and Lannister, mine carried none but the four most meager and unworthy letters that a man of my station could carry, which is, of course, ‘Snow.’

All bastards exist for the same reason, I suppose. Indiscretion is a sin which transcends rank. My mother was Lyanna Stark, the sister of Lord Eddard Stark and a woman of high birth; my father is a blank in the histories of my conception. After her death, I was passed on to an orphanage, where I might have passed the entirety of my adolescence but for a few my mother’s old friends, who took pity upon me and delivered me into the keeping of the military once I came of age. I was admitted at thirteen into the selective military boarding school they call Castle Black, and from there earned a scholarship to Oxford, a feat probably helped by the kindness of my dear mentor Colonel Aemon, who had ties on the board of directors.

In this fashion I arrived at university. I had with me only a single trunk of luggage and the thrilling knowledge that while nothing laid behind me, everything might well lay ahead. 

Oxford seen on the first day of Michaelmas is a breath of crisp air, a brother’s embrace, a warm drink, a dream. Boys in smart suits marched up and down the boulevards with the taut excitement in their every step, and the wind made shining flags of girls’ hair. Parents huddle in bittersweet couplets at the front door of each dorm, crooning tearful goodbyes to their fleeing children (although no such pair stood at my back, and there were no mournful songs for me). Anklets of fallen leaves gathered on the sidewalks and crunched reassuringly underfoot as I dragged my trunk up the many steps to Rhoynar’s College, just off the front quad.

My room was small and comfortable. There was a second bed and bureau which laid empty in expectation of my roommate, presumably another fresher. I did not have to wait long to meet him.

As I was tucking away the last of my clothes, the door swung open, and in strode a boy with a slight, soft face and tousled brown curls, dressed in a suit of emerald green. He stood with a jaunty posture, hip cocked and one hand tucked in his pocket, emitting a kind of styled grace that came from practice and not ease. 

“Why, hello, old boy,” he cried, clipping his consonants so crisply he almost missed them. “So we’re stuck together, eh?”

I crossed the room and shook his hand at once. He introduced himself as Loras Tyrell. He was the third and youngest son of the Lord Speaker. I told him it was an honor to make his acquaintance.

“Good Lord, you could cut glass with that accent,” he laughed. “I suppose I won’t bother asking where you’re from. What part of the North?”

“Castle Black.”

“Oh, you’re a soldier,” he exclaimed. “That’s why you’re so neat. I thought you mightn’t have moved in yet, your side of the room looked so miserably bare.” He laughed again. “Don’t take offense. I’m not a serious person, you know. What’s your name, soldier man?”

“Jon Snow.”

“Snow?” he said, frowning. “Say, where’ve I heard your name before?”

Quietly, and with great embarrassment, I told him in brief the story of my conception.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, and whacked himself in the temple. “Of course! You’re a cousin of the Starks. I thought your coloring was too familiar for coincidence.”

My cousins, of which I had five, I had never seen. They lived at the family seat some leagues south of Castle Black, and needless to say, the Lord Stark did not make a point of advertising my existence. Occasionally there was some vague acknowledgement of my existence made by way of a birthday card, or a cheque for new shoes when my boots ran threadbare, but that was the extent of our familiarity. The younger set I only heard of from afar.

I had known they were at Oxford, and had exercised great discipline in restraining myself from fantasy. I did not presume that they would want to see me, or that I could represent anything to them but an embarrassment to their house.

“Do I look much like them?” My voice arched with traitorous hope.

“Why, yes. It’s uncanny, as a matter of fact. The first time I saw you, I thought Ned Stark had appeared in my dorm to scold me for my indiscretions.” He chuckled. “I suppose you haven’t met them, then?”

“No. I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Good,” he said, so severely that I flinched. “I have to be honest with you, here, Jon. They’re a nice bunch of people, I’m sure, but you want to steer clear of them. They have a lot of enemies. And you — I mean, I’m not trying to be an arse here, but with a name like Snow, can you really afford to have enemies?”

I might have remarked that even without trying, he had accomplished the task splendidly anyway. But I took no offense. Already I understood that Loras was essentially harmless, and my time at Castle Black, spent among men with far more to gain and less to lose, had taught me to weather much more naked hostilities than this. 

Besides, he was right. A boy like me had no place in a feud among lordships, and I was too grateful for the honor of studying amidst their ranks to risk my position by involving myself with affairs in which I had no stake nor family ties.

“I wouldn’t worry on my account,” I assured him. “I doubt they’ll be interested in me.”

“Well, they’re a strange set,” he said vaguely. “Since you haven’t any mother or father to advise you in these things, someone ought to tell you. Your reputation here is a line of credit you’ll have for your whole life. Association, even if unintentional, is the surest way of improving or sullying that credit. Do you know what I mean? Now, some of that will be whatever you sit for, and that’s inevitable. Find chaps in your department you can get along with, and stick to them. Remember, connections are easily made and strenuously broken. And another thing…”

He went on like this for quite a while. Over the course of a rambling and winding conversational path, he recited instructions for choosing a suitable school, maintaining acceptable grades, where to buy one’s clothes, which clubs to attend, running for Union, and why I should under no circumstances listen to the Septas, or involve myself with religious organizations of any kind. 

I nodded along. Already I had devised the strategy by which I would tolerate living with Loras Tyrell: I agreed pleasantly and funneled his advice straight out the other ear.

***

After an initial flurry of orientation, classes began. I found myself performing well but not spectacularly in most, with a high point in Greek and a low one in Naval History. When I made the mistake of mentioning this to Loras, he had reacted with great dismay and immediately went about arranging for me a tutor. The kindness of this gesture did not go unappreciated, but since the beginning of term I had begun to suspect that Loras regarded me not as a friend and peer, but as a particularly downtrodden sort of pet, which was to be cared for out of pity and not esteem.

Nevertheless, I met faithfully with Theon Greyjoy twice a week in the hopes of punching up that shabby Naval History mark. He was a thin and prickly boy with a face that seemed permanently wizened by a sneer, a pubescent dusting of a mustache, and clothes that stank perennially of salt from his long outings with the sailing club. He often made fun of people under his breath, and he had a particular talent for self-aggrandizement that stood out even among the highborn crowd. Yet he had the most brilliant mind for naval history that I had ever seen. Theon could recite sea battles as though reading from a cue card held three feet in front of his face. He rattled off names, dates, and ship formations with the natural fluidity of an actor doing an old part. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of tide patterns and currents — I had once watched, slack-jawed, as he sprang to his feet, ran over to a chalkboard, and sketched a functioning map of the South Atlantic and all its constituent current systems from pure memory — and although he was not much in the way of a teacher, there was something satisfying in and of itself about listening to him speak in an area at which he so obviously excelled.

We usually took our meetings in the library, but this October morning in particular had been too temperate and sunny and otherwise outlandishly out of character for English weather to waste, and so we moved to a picnic blanket outside. It was an astonishing day. The grass was luscious and verdant beneath us, the sky a perfect blue. The air was sweet and full of flowers. I could have imagined no more fitting pastoral than this to serve as an entrance for the four people whose existences would become the utmost soul and purpose of my own.

Theon was reading aloud. I had looked up from my textbook to give my weary eyes a rest, and they fell on a small group of boys and girls making their way across the quad. I remember being struck first by their beauty, and then by their similarity, which presented itself in subtle but distinct ways upon inspection. I noted their similar coloring, and the recurring style made present in their clothes, and the strangely familiar slant to the youngest girl’s nose, which reminded me of a picture I had seen once, somewhere, although I could not remember where. Then I saw that one of them sat in a wheelchair, and I realized with a stutter of the heart that they were the Starks.

The oldest was a tall, red-haired boy, muscular but not bulky, who sported a rugged crop of facial hair that emphasized the artistic concave of his cheekbone. Beneath an intense set of eyebrows glared two bright blue eyes, and he wore a black fitted suit which suited him almost unfairly. He walked with an almost dogged sense of purpose, eyes locked in front of him, body moving as you would like a machine to move.

His first sister could be his twin, both in coloring and loveliness. Her cheeks were softer than her brothers’, her jaw curved where his was square, but in their face was the same heartbreaking beauty that brings artists to ecstasy and lovers to tears. The arresting red of her hair, which in her brother could be mistaken for auburn, absorbed the sun and seemed to glow with its own light. She strode in his wake with slight, dainty steps, as though she did not step upon the ground itself, but floated above it.

The other two had countenances more typical of the North. The girl was short, dark-haired, and wore men’s clothes. Reams of muscle laced her arms, and from the short length of her hair I could have at first mistaken her for a boy. There was a hard, almost chilling edge to her expression, even happy. Beside her, a small lad in a wheelchair coasted along beside his siblings with a carefree air, his dark eyes hidden behind a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

“…Jon? Jon,” Theon’s irritated voice broke into my diorama. “Are you paying attention? What are you — oh.” He noticed them, and soured. “Of course.”

“What do you mean, ‘of course’?”

“It means shut your jaw, you’re drooling,” he snapped. I wasn’t, but it was a telling indication of my distraction that I checked anyway. “Those are the Starks. Half the university’s in love with them, and the other half wants to spill their guts.”

From his tone I was tempted to say,  _And which half are you?_

“Loras mentioned something to that effect,” I murmured. “The second part, I mean. Is there any particular reason why?” As I watched, the redhead girl turned to her counterpart and said something that made them all burst out laughing. It was an ethereal, almost musical sound.

“There’s more than one reason. Most of it is older than they are. Blood feuds, that sort of thing.”

“With whom?”

“What, are you prepping for an exam? With families that old, these kinds of things date back decades. Centuries, even. I don’t have the time to get into it, even if I did have the desire.”

I figured this meant he didn’t know.

“What’re their names?” I asked.

“Don’t you — oh. I suppose you wouldn’t, being new. The big one’s Robb,” he said, jerking his thumb at the tall redhead. “Fencing team captain, stubborn as an ass. Anybody who’s met the both of them will tell you he’s a living miniature of Eddard Stark, at least in personality. The girls are Sansa and Arya, although with Arya you can’treally tell — Robb lets her fence with the boys. And the small one’s Bran.” 

“Do they usually travel around together like that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. They’re a pack. Stick together like glue. I guess that’s what happens when you’re raised somewhere without any other children around, you don’t learn how to make friends.”

Despite the fact that I didn’t know them, something in me rose to the bait. “Or they don’t want to,” I suggested.

He peered at me and his brows drew together. “Well, yes, I suppose. There’s always snobbery.”

“Not like that.” I struggled to find the words I meant. “I just mean — well, if you think you’ve found the people you’re meant to be with forever, why would you bother looking for anyone else?”

Theon was taken aback by this. He belatedly muttered some dismissive retort, but I was distracted by the Starks. They had reached the end of the quad, and were filing into the building, passing one by one out of sight. I craned my neck to watch them as long as I could. Theon noticed, and snorted.

“If you want my advice,” he said, with a funny little hint of something nasty in his voice, “don’t bother. It’s a lost cause, with Starks. They don’t go for just anybody, and they’re not friendly to strangers.”

I gathered from his choice of words and odd sense of familiarity that there was some history between them, but he refused to elaborate on the circumstances of the altercation, and I eventually gave up on drawing it out of him.

***

Try as I might, I could not put the Starks out of my head. They seemed, indeed, to be everywhere: at the table next to mine in the dining hall, lurking in my favorite corners of the library, descending like a divine infestation on whatever communal space I happened to be using at the moment. I wondered, in some of my more undignified moments, whether they weren’t doing it intentionally.

I desired terribly to meet them. Gone were my resolutions from the beginning of the year, when I had so nobly sworn to keep my distance and spare them the shame of my company. Entirely forgotten were my thoughts of propriety and common sense. I wanted to know them, to dig my fingers into the corners of their beautiful and enigmatic lives. I wanted to stand, just for a while, in that little field of glory they brought with them whenever they entered a room.

Finally, out of curiosity, I went to a fencing practice. It struck me as a defensibly benign thing to do. The Oxford team was said to be quite good, and since practices were open, I would hardly be the only one there, so it was unlikely that they would notice me. There I had a guarantee of at least two Starks, and I hoped that seeing them in their normal habitat might sate my irrational desire for their company.

I tested the idea by pitching it to Loras, wary of a rebuke for my obvious motivations, but he merely beamed and said, “My dear friend! I’m flattered, although I’m afraid we will dreadfully disappoint you. We don’t do much of anything interesting at practice.”

He accompanied me to the pitch. The fencers had their own gymnasium, a giant vault of a room with arched bay windows and oak paneling. Some wood bleachers were set up along one wall for spectators, and Loras escorted me with much more fanfare than I would have liked to a choice seat in the front. It was the opposite of what I wanted, which was a position in the far back, where I could watch without any chance of being seen. Still, it was hard to turn him down — Loras had a puppyish innocence that one felt the impulse to preserve at all costs — and so I thanked him and took a seat.

There was only one other person on the bleachers, a girl sitting high and near the back. I noticed, bashfully, that she was beautiful, with gold hair woven into an elaborate knot and eyes the color of flint-marbled jade. She did not appear to be watching the actual practice, but instead was reading a book.

All across the room white-suited boys danced up and down thin strips upon the floor. 

Loras was obviously talented, besting several opponents in the space of five minutes and sparing the time to throw me an occasional wink. Either he was a total showoff (true) or he was creating drama for my benefit (entirely possible), for more than once he employed an overcomplicated flourish or sleight where a simpler thrust might have served just as well.

I was intrigued by the sport of fencing. In theory it was supposed to be a martial art. Its tradition was the duelingYet it was hard to understand, in the context of my military education, how these lithe gymnasts could be related to the brawlers and gunmen that emerged each year from Castle Black. There were no attempts made to even feign actual injury. Victories, if they could be called that, came with the simple touch of a point to a piece of armoring. Most puzzling of all, the duelers took turns, exchanging blows the way one might pass a ball back and forth over a tennis net.

I wondered what any of them would do in a real duel. Would they dance, the way they did here? Were they capable of doing violence, these boys in white? Could they ever strike to kill?

Someone stepped in front of me, throwing shade over my face. I looked up. 

It was Arya. She wore a white fencer’s suit and balanced the tip of her foil on one toe.

“Hello, coz,” she said casually, as though we were old friends of fifty years, and I froze. Her voice was lower than I expected, rougher, and it startled me. Somehow I had not realized the Starks would speak with Northern accents.

“Lady Arya,” I said, and hurriedly stood to bow.

“Oh, don’t you dare,” she said sternly, cutting me off mid-gesture. “Stand up straight, man. We’re all students here.”

“I — apologize, my lady—”

“None of that, either. It’s Arya. Plain Arya. And you’re Jon, yes?”

Somehow in my flustered state I managed to utter a coherent answer.

“So we’re related, yeah? You’re Aunt Lyanna’s bastard.” She spoke so coolly one might think she were remarking on the temperature. 

Here it came. The rebuke, the order of distance.

“Yes,” I said, humiliated. “I am.”

“Gods, don’t look so angry about it,” she said, frowning. “You are, aren’t you? It’s just a fact. Worse people to be the bastard of, I’ll tell you. I was only asking because it means we’re family.”

I lost feeling in my tongue entirely. When I regained it, I found myself stuttering, “I — no, I wouldn’t — I’m not really family, milady. I wouldn’t presume—”

“My aunt is your mother. My father is your uncle. My grandfather is your grandfather. Ergo, therefore,  _family_ . Shall I get a chart?”

“Not family in name, though, milady.”

“Hang  _names_ ,” she said indifferently. “Blood’s deeper than all that. And I told you not to call me milady.”

“Yes, m— er, yes.”

She smiled. Her eyes crinkled, and I found myself tentatively, shyly smiling back.

“I’m glad you came,” she said, gesturing broadly at the gymnasium. “It’s a great team, if you’d like to try out for it. Do you fence?”

“I can handle a sword. I’m not sure they’re the same, though.”

“Oh, but that’s much better,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been itching to have a real match. D’you fancy a go?”

It took a moment to realize what she meant.

“You want me to—”

“Please?”

“I don’t have gear.”

“Don’t need any. I’ll go easy.”

“I don’t know the rules.”

“We’ll play casual, then! Come on,” she whined. “What’s a friendly match between cousins? I’m not really that good, anyway. You’ll probably beat me. I just want some practice, honestly.”

She paused while I dithered, and then adopted an expression of resigned disappointment. “I wouldn’t ask,” she said, “except, well, you know — none of the boys on the team will spar with me, since I’m a girl.”

My heart, which had already melted at seeing its old melancholies reflected in her lonely stare, could not bear this last assault. “That’s nonsense,” I said, irritated on her behalf. “Of course I’ll spar with you, Arya.”

Her eyes lit up, and I knew at once that I was finished, fucked, utterly done for: under the influence of that look, with its stupefying cocktail of approval and fondness, I could not have resisted her if I tried.

“Let’s get you a foil,” she said, tugging me to my feet and hurrying me over to the equipment rack. “A four should do, you’re not that much taller than I am. We can go up to a five if you want more reach. Tell me if that feels comfortable,” and she handed me one of their training swords, a long, slim blade with a steel cup. I picked it up and hefted it. It was uncomfortably light, almost like wielding air, and I wondered again what damage anyone was supposed to do with this kind of thing.

“It doesn’t have much weight to it,” I said, “does it?”

Arya shook her head. “Not if you’re used to a two-hander. Did you train with a broadsword at Castle Black?”

I was surprised that she knew where I had gone to school. I didn’t remember telling her. “A longsword,” I said absently, giving the foil a few experimental swings. It whistled as it slit the air, like a whip. “And knives, for versatility. Some practice with rapier, but little. They’re not really ‘killing’ swords…” Then I cut myself off, remembering with a jolt that this was not appropriate subject matter for discussion with a lady. It was the kind of thing that I might say off-handedly to another soldier, but hardly polite to mention in Arya’s presence.

She didn’t seem bothered. In fact, she shrugged, as if I had said something neither objectionable nor controversial in the slightest. “Well, no. It’d be pretty poor planning if we used our killing swords at tournaments, eh? Wouldn’t have any team left by the end of the year.” She grinned at me, all bleak humor, and I let out a surprised laugh.

I ended up taking the heavier size, which in terms of weight registered to me only as the difference between two kinds of feathers, and we went to an empty strip by the center of the gym. Arya took up position at one end, and I stood at the other. Uncertain of the positions we were meant to follow, I cautiously modeled her stance: cocked to one side, right foot forward, with my free hand tucked behind my back.

“First to three touches,” she said. “Chest, arms, legs.”

I nodded.

She lifted her tip. The line of her blade split her face in half. Behind the steel, her eyes were dark and glittering.

“ _Allez_ ,” she cried, and advanced.

I was clumsy with the blade, unused to the weight, unused to the balance. Arya advanced sideways in three quick, shuffling steps, and tapped the edge of my sword with hers. It was a glancing, exploratory blow, and I returned it uneasily. My response landed hard enough to sway it off its line, but she moved back without pause and darted another playful strike at my shoulder. It was easy enough to bat away. I began to feel better. I attempted a low thrust at her stomach.

She smacked my point away with an almost scolding ease, and the sharp whine of steel drawing attention from nearby students. Then she stabbed me in the arm.

“Touch,” she said. I realized that I had made a grave error of possibly unfathomable depth.

Her sword darted forward and I parried, and I parried again, and parried still a third time as she flung blow after blow at me in ceaseless volley. I backpedaled fast, and she followed me step for step. I saw now how their dancing was more than frivolity, as each step she took was perfectly in pace with mine, each bringing her within exactly the distance needed to strike. Like a viper, her tiny sword flickered out once, twice, and then jabbed me with considerable force in the sternum.

I knocked it away, and she was fast in the countermove, springing into motion before she had disengaged. The edges of the blades scraped as she shoved hers forward and down, not a stab but a lock, pinning my sword to the mat. I recognized the move too late. I leapt backward, and in the split second of instability before I found my back foot, she surged forward and thrust her point neatly into the hollow of my throat.

Unbalanced, I choked, wobbled, and lost my footing. I fell and landed hard on my back. My sword clattered to the floor.

Someone coughed. I lifted my head and saw that the attention of the chamber had shifted to us during the fight. Virtually all other matches had stopped to observe ours. Now, a barely repressed titter went up among the men of the fencing team, a conflagration which quickly blazed into outright laughter. 

The boy who had been sparring with Loras, a tall and willowy fencer with golden curls and a handsome, rather snide smile, perched his hand on his hip. “Oh, dear,” he said. “It appears our new friend has rather lost his balance.”

“Three,” Arya said. Her hair was mussed and there was a delighted flush in her cheeks. She stepped forward and offered me her hand, but I couldn’t bring myself look at her.

One of the boys who had been laughing pulled off his helmet, and to my horror it was Robb. He leaned on his sword and grinned at me. “What’d she tell you?” he called. “She’d go easy on you? Casual rules? That nobody else would duel her—”

“—because she’s a girl?” finished one of the others, to a collective roar of amusement.

I swallowed around a bitter knot of embarrassment in my throat. Robb’s expression softened, and he strode over to our piste. He held out his hand to me. I hesitated, then clasped it, and he hauled me up as easily as if he were lifting a doll.

“Don’t feel too bad,” he said. “You’re not the first. Everyone in this room’s been knocked on their arse by Arya at least once. It’s a rite of passage. What’s your name, son?”

“Jon Snow.”

I waited for the predictable wince, awkward aversion of the eyes, and murmur of recognition to which I had become so accustomed with other students. But Robb held my gaze, unwavering, and firmly shook my hand.

“Robb Stark,” he said. “It’s good to meet you, Jon. You’re already acquainted my sister, I see.”

I was flustered, and attempted to justify myself. “She said nobody else would spar with her.”

“Well, that’s true,” he said lightly. “But the reason no one’ll take her is because no one likes getting their pride flogged at four o’clock on a Monday, not because she’s a girl. Although that does make it worse, for some of them.”

The blond fencer from before strolled up to us. “Listen, Snow,” he said seriously. “I think it’s very honorable, what you did. I mean, it’s one thing to refuse to spar with a woman. But to refuse even to put a single hit on her — to lose so spectacularly and totally, and in such short order — well, it’s entirely beyond me.”

He smirked. He had a smile that was at the same time taunting and insouciant, careless and deliberately cruel, a gesture that dared you to take offense while simultaneously ignoring any implication of insult. I didn’t trust a man like that — a man who would pinch you just to see if you flinched, then claim he didn’t think it would hurt.

“Jon,” Robb said wearily, “this is Jaime Lannister.”

“Nice to meet you,” I lied.

“Pleasure,” drawled Jaime Lannister, who did not offer his hand.

Robb turned to address the gymnasium at large. “Hey, you lot,” he bellowed, in a voice that swelled to fill the chamber like a priest’s. Across the room, ranks of white-suited boys snapped to attention in a manner not dissimilar to how my peers at Castle Black attended our sergeant. “Did I say you could have a kip? This isn’t a picture theater. Get back to work.”

Immediately the clamor of foils meeting erupted from the chamber as they hastily plunged back into their exercises. Jaime delayed in following the order, instead electing to stand still and yawn into his hand. But once Robb turned back towards him, he obediently slunk away, albeit not to any particular match but to the locker room.

The girl on the bleachers abruptly shut her book and followed. I watched her descend the stairs with a delicate, deliberate air, cast a haughty glance around the gymnasium — it hovered for a moment on me, and I saw her mouth pucker imperceptibly with disdain — and then she swept out of the room.

“That’s Cersei,” Arya muttered, noticing the curiosity that must have been written on my face. “His sister. Heinous bitch, if you ask me.”

“Which he didn’t,” Robb said sternly. “And language, Arya.”

“Oh, fuck off, I get enough of it from Sansa without you piling on, too—”

“Arya.”

“Sorry. Not at practice. I know.”

He inclined his head to me. “Normally I wouldn’t care,” he explained, his tone almost apologetic. “But I really can’t let her get away with it, here. I don’t allow the boys talk to me that way, and if I let her do it, it’d have favoritism written all over it. They already think it’s nepotism, her being on the team.”

Arya said loudly, “Which it isn’t.”

“Which it isn’t,” he agreed in a pacificatory way.

I awkwardly picked up my fallen foil. It struck me as an opportune time to extricate myself from the situation’s thorny arms. “Well,” I said, “I think I’d better get going.”

“Oh, no,” Arya said, genuinely crestfallen. “Did we scare you off? I’m sorry. I won’t cuss.”

“No — no, you were perfectly wonderful. But you should return to your practice, and I shouldn’t overstay—”

“Listen,” Robb said, in that commanding cadence of his, and I almost straightened up and clicked my heels by sheer force of instinct. He clapped his hand on my shoulder. “It’s a shame that we haven’t met before. I kept meaning to make the introduction myself, but I just couldn’t find anyone who knew you — having met you, I’m beginning to understand that, actually, quiet chap like yourself — and anyway, I’m sure the rest of the family would like to get acquainted. Say you come over sometime, give us a call?”

“You’re very kind,” I said uncertainly. I could not tell whether this was one of those courtesy invitations which it fell upon the subject to decline, and erred on the side of caution. “But I’m sure that the Lady Sansa and Lord Bran have much better things to do.”

“Certainly not. You’d be a favored guest.”

“I’m not certain that would be prudent.”

“Well, just ring us ahead of time, of course, and we’d be happy to prepare for you—”

Arya rolled her eyes. “Robb, he’s embarrassed,” she cut in. 

Robb frowned. “Whatever of?”

“That he’s a bastard,” she said, bored. “That his name’s different, whatever the hell that means. He’s got some kind of thing about it, I don’t know. Just tell him that you don’t care already, and then we can get on with this conversation and the rest of our lives.”

He looked sharply at me. “Is that right?”

I glared at Arya. “It’s not that simple,” I began, but he interrupted me.

“Well, that settles it, then,” he said, and anyone listening to him could not have helped but agree that things were, indeed, settled. “You’re coming to dinner on Thursday. Don’t argue. Bring your favorite vintage and a nice suit. If you’ve some other obligation, cancel it. I won’t hear any objections.”

Numbly, I agreed.

“I should like to have your room, for the purposes of communication, and also to sic Arya on you if you fail to show up. Where do you live?”

I told him.

He recited it once to himself and nodded. “Good. Now, Jon, I expect you to be on my doorstep at nine o’clock on Thursday with a bottle of wine and a tie. If any of those three qualifications are not met, I will be very disappointed in you, and what’s worse, Sansa will be disappointed in you. Can I have your word as a man that you won’t make my sister unhappy?”

Weakly, I said yes.

“Let’s have it a bit more explicitly, Jon. I want particulars.”

“I give you my word that I will be on your doorstep at nine o’clock. With a bottle of wine, and a tie.”

“Good man,” he said, and thumped me on the back. I did not stagger, but it was close. “Now, I’ve a practice to run. See you Thursday, eh?”

“Thursday,” I affirmed. We shook hands again in goodbye. Then he spun and marched back into the ranks of his fellow white-coated teammates, barking orders.

Arya nudged me. “What do you think of him?” she murmured.

I could not gather words. Nor would I for some time. My tenure at Oxford would be long over, in fact, to distill all that I knew and felt about Robb Stark into something so simple that words could give life to it. Years later, reminiscing on the memory of his hand clasped on my shoulder, and the boom of his great Northern brogue as it echoed in that airy gymnasium, I would realize what it was.

In the moment I thought him commandeering, confident, a tad coercive, and a touch presumptuous. He had impressed me with his limitless goodwill, but unnerved me with his overly fraternal air. I suspected that part of it was facetious, and that he got some secret joy out of making me uncomfortable. That, or he was too thick to understand why someone of my station might be reluctant to accept a dinner invitation to a gathering composed solely of my legitimate cousins.

Knowing then what I know now, none of that is accurate. Robb had no intention in the slightest of making me uncomfortable, and it would have been the height of shame for him to think he had caused it. These uncharitable suspicions of mine were products of our being strangers to each other, and nothing more. 

How little I understood the man who would come to irrevocably alter the course of my life.


	3. Chapter 3

_Well, it's a marvelous night for a moondance  
_ _With the stars up above in your eyes  
A fantabulous night to make romance  
‘Neath the cover of October skies  
And all the leaves on the trees are falling  
To the sound of the breezes that blow  
And I'm trying to please to the calling  
Of your heart-strings that play soft and low_

—Van Morrison, “Moondance”

* * *

The wine proved a matter of great concern. The assumption that Robb had made, entirely without malice, was that I had the money to purchase a bottle of any ‘vintage,’ let alone a good one.

On Loras’ recommendation I visited a small shop down the road from the university which happened to boast a variety of elite vineyards, and asked the steward to surprise me. The bottle which he produced put a considerable dent in my finances, but I had taken a loan from the Iron Bank at the beginning of term to pay for my books and other scholarly expenses, and thanks to my weeks of frugal living in October a considerable portion of it remained in the account. I justified the expense by reasoning that any purchase made in pursuit of Robb Stark’s approval was an investment in my own future, and anyway I would not get half as much use out of a textbook as I would a fine wine.

Ironically, the suit provided greater difficulty. Apart from some serviceable but informal civilian wear, the nicest clothing I owned was my service uniform. It was perfectly good for most formal events, but would seem dreadfully out of place among their finery. Moreover, it was a glaring reminder of my background, which I worried would divert their attention unnecessarily to the differences between us. After several days of worry and increasing despair, I made plans to visit a nearby upscale thrift shop on Thursday morning.

Loras, in an uncharacteristic fit of helpfulness, would not hear of it. Although he did not know who I would be dining with, I had told him when soliciting advice for the wine selection that I would be attending a dinner party, and his imagination had staffed the gathering with all sorts of reputable people he thought I ought to impress.

“A thrift shop! Jon, don’t insult me,” he scoffed, flinging open his bureau doors. “You’ll borrow something of mine, of course. They’ll be a bit tight around the chest, but that sort of thing is in fashion nowadays. What’s your style?”

I had none, and told him he better pick for me. His answering beam assured me this was the best possible answer I could have given.

“Not to fear. I’ve all sorts of ideas. Now, I’m tempted to put you in one of my smoking jackets with the blue marbling, it’d do astounding things for your eyes. But it’s a bit much for a dinner party. Just a small gathering, you said? Yes, a bit much. I’m thinking a neutral. You favor blacks, I know, but would you object terribly to something different? A gray, perhaps?”

I shrugged. As long as the suit looked respectable, I had no objections to wearing whatever Loras liked.

“Gray, then. If I could sneak in a blue — for the tie, hmm, or the pocket square — just to play up the eyes… well, try this, anyway,” he said, and pulled out a garment bag.

I had to give it to Loras: the suit was magnificent. It was a three-piece affair of dove gray tweed, soft as cotton and twice as breathable, which hugged the waist and drew a flattering line over the shoulders. He also loaned me a black silk tie, which he knotted for me in a full Windsor after scolding me on my miserable four-in-hand — “Honestly, Jon, don’t they teach you anything in the army?” — and a pale blue pocket square that was embroidered with three white roses. The suit was tight, but he assured me that it was a flattering effect, and looking in the mirror I had to agree with him. The man I saw reflected was not a bastard from Castle Black, but a gentleman of high standing and sophisticated tastes, outfitted in the trappings of his class, the kind who you might expect to see at any nobleman’s dinner party.

He waved away my profuse thanks. “It’s nothing, nothing,” he commanded airily. “You must keep it. A man should have a suit for fine occasions.”

“Loras, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Of course you can. I’ll have a new wardrobe by spring, anyway, and if you don’t take it it’ll go into some dusty box somewhere. You ought to take it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Deadly. You’ve probably stretched it out, anyway; I couldn’t wear it if I wanted to.”

I thanked him again. He dismissed it and harried me out of the room, insisting that I have ‘a grand time’ and not return until after midnight at least. Feeling fine and boldly optimistic, I tucked my bottle in the curve of my arm and made my way over to my cousins’ place.

The Starks kept a suite of rooms on the third floor of the Hampden Building, on the scenic edge of Andal College. Unlike my own dorm, the place was deathly silent, a set of dimly lit oak hallways populated with ornate portraits of unhappy-looking trustees. It smelled of old wood and wet stone. Each door was fashioned with a gold plate, and the names embossed upon them read like a roster of English aristocracy.

I found the proper door and stood there for longer than I can proudly admit gathering the courage to knock. I felt that I stood at the end of a long pier, one foot on the dock and one on the gangplank to a vast and magnificent ship, poised to climb aboard.

My knock was met by several beats of quiet. Then quick footsteps sounded behind the door, and it was answered by Robb, dressed in a black three-piece suit with a navy tie. When he saw me his face broke open in a smile.

“He’s here,” he called.

He was answered by a high, melodic voice saying, “Oh, bring him in!”

Upon entrance to their apartment I was greeted by a long and cluttered hallway, littered with several bags of fencing equipment and a coatrack that was suffocating under the weight of four sets of winter gear. Robb shucked me of my own overcoat, adding it haphazardly to the pile, and ushered me into the parlor with a hand at the small of my back. From there we emerged into a small warm room with a brick fireplace which housed a friendly pile of guttering coals, a pair of red leather armchairs and a sofa. To one side branched another gauntlet of doors through which I caught a glimpse of their bedrooms. To the other was the kitchen and dining room.

The apartment verged on untidiness. Books piled most everywhere, wedged in at odd angles on the shelves, stacked on the piano, even sitting in unkempt stacks on the floor. Papers foamed from the typewriter in the corner, sketches and lists and scribbled notes. A full ashtray balanced on the hearth. A half-finished chess game waited on the coffee table. All around us there were strange objects — preserved animals swimming in formaldehyde, Grecian urns, a wax fruit arrangement (did I imagine one bore teeth marks?), a glass case of swords, a wire cage holding a mechanical goldfinch — and most striking of all, a taxidermy wolf’s head, snarling above the fireplace.

Robb brushed past it all. “This way,” he told me, and escorted me into the dining room.

The other three were already seated at the table, and in an eerie show of synchrony, their heads moved as one to look when I entered the room. Arya, who was wearing black trousers and what must have been her brother’s suspenders, grinned at once. “Nice suit,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Bran wheeled himself around the table to come shake my hand. “Bran Stark,” he said, quite friendly. “Robb told us you’d be coming. Sorry about the mess, it’s a hazard of living with Arya.”

“He says that as if he doesn’t keep dead cats in jars.”

“For scientific purposes!”

Sansa rose from her seat with imperial grace. She was more stunning in person, with part of her hair threaded into a rose of braids at the back of her head and the other half left to stream over the shoulders. Her gown was wine-colored satin, with a bodice of black lace and a skirt that ended several inches above the ankle and gave the occasional daring flash of pale skin when she walked. A pair of white dinner gloves reached up to her elbow. She walked around the table and extended her hand to me, fingers-down, in a way that left ambiguous the question of what to do with it; hesitating, I bent and kissed it.

She let out a musical little laugh of surprise. Apparently mine had not been the correct reaction, but she seemed so pleased anyway that it didn’t matter. “It’s nice to meet you, too,” she said.

From my periphery, Arya rolled her eyes so hard that her irises momentarily disappeared.

“What have you got there?” Robb prompted, and I handed him the bottle. He examined the label, and one eyebrow jumped with intrigue. “Chambertin? Well, my goodness, Jon, you do have expensive taste. Can’t fault you, though. Sansa, would you get the decanter? We’ll let it lounge for a while before we taste it.” He produced a silver corkscrew from a side drawer and started carving off the foil.

“Chambertin was Napoleon’s wine,” Bran remarked. “He carried a case of it with him during military campaigns.”

“Is that right?” Robb’s voice carried the indulgent disinterest of a parent. He confided in me, “Bran’s our historian. He’s reading for classics, like Sansa, but he really should be in history instead. He’s got a great brain for facts.”

“Classics are more interesting,” Bran said with a shrug. “History’s a hobby.”

“They’re also much less employable,” Robb sighed. “Thank the gods he’ll never have to work. Ah, thank you, Sansa,” and he popped the cork out with an elegant flick of the wrist. He filled the decanter up to its swanlike funnel of a neck, set the bottle in its skirt, and then we all sat down to dinner.

It was a feast. I had never eaten so much at a single meal. First there was an hors d’oeuvre of shrimp cocktail, the meat as fresh as if they had been in the Atlantic that very morning, their plump pink bodies curled in frills over vast champagne bowls full of tangy red sauce. Then a cream of wild mushroom soup with freshly baked bread, still warm from the oven, from which we cut thick slices so soft they seemed to melt on the tongue and smeared with salted butter that came out in pats shaped like seashells. For the main course there was a crown roast of lamb, peas, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. The meat of the lamb was cooked to juicy, perfect tenderness, and the potatoes were fluffy as mounds of cotton, amply oiled with butter and chives. I stuffed myself to the point of sickness, and then forgot about my fullness as soon as they brought out for dessert a sliced pound cake and raspberry ganache, which was so rich that each bite felt sinfully indulgent.

And with each course, we drank. We drank white wines with the appetizers and rosé for the soup, and my Chambertin for the main course and dessert, each in its own glass, which accumulated on the white tabletop like a menagerie of spirits. As the night slipped on the wine deposited a cheerful warmth in my belly, a sense of universal camaraderie which managed to altogether banish any anxieties I had harbored about the evening.

The Starks had a particular rhythm of conversation to which it took me a while to adapt. Robb steered, for the most part, reclining at the head of the table with his legs crossed in kingly repose and his wineglass clasped thoughtfully by the stem. They all deferred to him, consciously or not. When he spoke it was rare that anyone else interrupted him, even Arya, who specialized in the art of the arresting interjection. He could grant audiences by electing simply to look at the person speaking, at which point the rest of the table tended to fall quiet and listen as well. His opinion often marked the final argument to be had on any subject. Despite this, one never got the sense that he dominated the others. He was merely their leader, and he presided over his kingdom with a just and fair hand.

Sansa was a subdued but delightful conversationalist. She tended to remain on the outskirts of the discussion, inserting into the fray herself only occasionally when she had a meaningful addition. I did like talking to her, but one got the feeling whenever she spoke that she was saying two things at the same time, and after the fourth or fifth glass of wine such matters gave me a headache. She and Arya were almost always at odds with each other, and would go to war over even the most insignificant subjects (“Why don’t you sit up straight for our guest, Arya,” “Why don’t you get off my arse,” etc). Bran was a neutral party to most of these skirmishes — although, if so enticed, he could be compelled to intervene on Arya’s behalf — and instead preferred to discourse for astounding lengths of time on subjects which any other man could not have stretched to fit two minutes. At separate points in the evening I found myself being submitted to lectures on Homeric meter, Catholicism, Byzantine armor, birdwatching, and methods of forensic analysis, among other things.

After dinner we cleared away the plates and glasses and retired to the living room. There we sipped from tiny porcelain cups of coffee, and Robb attempted to surreptitiously offer me a pack of cigarettes.

“Oh, Robb, I wish you wouldn’t,” Sansa bemoaned, catching him anyway. “It’s terrible for your breath.”

“I’ll chew a mint.”

“It doesn’t help, and you know it.”

“Smoking is Robb’s one vice,” Arya informed me. “He’s allowed a single bad habit, being perfect in every other way, you see.”

“I said you could have one if you wanted,” Robb said around the cigarette in his lips, patting his pockets for a light. 

“No, thanks. It tastes like shite.”

“Language,” murmured Sansa.

Robb said, “Do you smoke, Jon?”

“I don’t think they let you graduate at Castle Black unless you do,” I said, and he chuckled, tossing me the pack. He lit the end of my cigarette from his own, and then we each took a drag in unison. In consideration to Sansa, I blew the smoke over my shoulder, while Robb exhaled his in a curling grey sigh. The percolating scent of nicotine twined with that of woodsmoke and coffee.

“So,” said Sansa, arranging herself delicately in her armchair. “Jon, you’ve been quiet all evening. Tell us about yourself.”

“Yes,” said Bran, nodding. “We’ve been waiting for ages to hear the adventures our mysterious military boarding-school cousin.” To hear myself referred to as ‘mysterious’ was the height of comedy. I stifled a guffaw.

“We shall have  _all_ the details,” Sansa added teasingly, and the pressure eased a bit.

“There’s nothing interesting to talk about,” I said. “It’s not like your lives, I expect, where exciting things are always happening. It’s just a lot of studying, and then, you know, running around and training.” I sipped my coffee to buy myself some time. “The Defense Secretary visited once, at graduation. Gave an address.”

“Bolton?” Robb’s mouth twisted in a moue of distaste. “Bit of a bastard, isn’t he?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Did you have to follow orders?” Bran asked curiously. “When the officers told you to do something, would you face a punishment if you didn’t do it?”

“Yes.” The answer quite scandalized him; I chuckled, and added, “But that’s the same as any school, really. You can’t do whatever you want, no matter where you are.”

Bran looked puzzled at this. I realized that it was entirely possible they  _could_ do whatever they want, and the idea of being under constant command by a higher entity that was not directly related to them was an entirely foreign concept.

“Did you wear a uniform?” inquired Sansa.

“Yes. I still have it, as a matter of fact.”

“Do you ever wear it?”

“Not while I’m off. I’ll have to wear it often enough when I’m called to serve. It’s a bit uncomfortable, to tell the truth.”

“You’ll be called to serve after graduation, then?”

“Mm-hm.”

“And how long will you have to do that?”

“Well, it depends—”

“Have you ever killed a man?” asked Arya, leaning forward in her chair.

I paused, fumbled the beat, and dropped it. The resulting silence was blistering.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Robb said sharply. “Good gods, Arya.” 

Bran had turned red and refused to meet my eyes. Sansa appeared too horrified to speak. 

“What?” Arya said defensively. “It’s a simple question.”

“It’s none of your business!”

“So what?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve never killed anyone.”

Arya’s head cocked. “Really? Isn’t that what you’re meant do, in the military?”

“Not in school, I believe.”

She said to Robb, “See? He’s never even killed anyone.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jon, I apologize for Arya. She doesn’t mean any harm, I promise.”

“I’m sitting right here,” she snapped.

“It’s all right,” I said, feeling guilty at having indirectly caused her chastisement. “It’s a reasonable enough question.”

“It’s really not,” he said tiredly, “but it’s good of you to try and be gracious about it. Let’s change the subject. Jon, I refuse to believe you survived four years of military school without any good stories. Spin us a yarn.”

All four of them waited expectantly. I coughed, set down my coffee, and hastily composed myself. “Well,” I said, hesitantly, and then ventured with tentative but growing aplomb into the story of how I and three of my classmates had found ourselves accidentally locked out of the castle during a blizzard, and had to navigate our way back inside through a process that involved bribing a kitchen assistant, stealing one of the stablehand’s bedsheets, and scaling a wall.

By the time I approached the conclusion, they were all doubled over and shaking with laughter. Arya was actually crying with mirth. Even Sansa could not repress a trail of hysterical giggles as I finished, “So  _I’m_ still outside, hanging somewhere around the second floor. Tormund’s supposed to hold the rope for me once he gets upstairs. I’m the last one in. Problem is, Tor gets himself up safely into the room, doesn’t realize that he’s the anchor, and  _lets go of the rope_ .”

Arya wailed helplessly with laughter, while Sansa gasped. Bran was shaking too hard to stay upright in his chair, and doubled over.

“So I go sailing down a full story — mind you, it’s still snowing at this point, and the wind’s kicking up, so I can’t see a bloody thing — and by chance, by some miracle, I manage to grab on to the second-story windowsill. To this day, I don’t know how. Pitch-black night? Middle of a snowstorm? I shouldn’t have had a chance.”

Robb had finished his cigarette and moved on to a glass of whiskey, which he swirled in amusement as he watched me. I had one too, and gesticulated with it as I told the story.

“Anyway, I get ahold of it. Almost takes both my arms off, but it’s still better than a three-story drop onto stone. I pull myself up, and wouldn’t you know it, the window’s unlocked. So I climb in. Now I’m in this dark room, and I can’t see the door, so I start poking around — trying not to make too much noise or anything, and being very careful, of course, since I’m not sure where I am—”

Sansa clutched her cup, wide-eyed. Their reactions were deeply gratifying; no one at the academy had ever been so taken by my stories, or seemed so invested in them.

“—until the Lieutenant General sits up in bed and asks me what the fuck I’m doing.”

Riot broke out. I sipped my whiskey as a warm coal blazed in my chest. An unbroken chorus of laughter filled the apartment for the better part of five minutes. At its denouement I was volleyed with demands for another, which I begged off on behalf of a sore throat. Then Bran told Sansa to sing something, which she demurred, and continued to refuse despite our entreatments, until Robb said, “Ah, go on, Sansa, won’t you,” at which point she went to the victrola and performed a heart-wrenching rendition of ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows’ in a breathy alto. Few eyes were dry at the end of it, save Arya’s, who jumped up and put on another record — this one a rabbity jazz tune imported from the states — and insisted that I dance with her. Perhaps I did, or perhaps I didn’t, for at that point the evening grew fuzzy. I remember at one point we were all on our feet, except of course for Bran, who was spinning around dancing with us anyway; I remember sitting on the windowsill, tonelessly belting the words to a song by Jo Baker. I remember lounging on the sofa and shouting out guesses in a game of charades, and competing with Bran for who could lob the most dates into Arya’s open mouth. There were more rounds of drinks and cigarettes, and music, always music, ferrying us onward like a barge of dreams and jazz chords as we drifted through the night.

It was long past midnight when I finally said I had to go.

Instantly I was met with vehement protest, but I felt determined to take my leave of them while I still had the faculties to walk and the dignity to do it with. “No, I should,” I said, clambering unsteadily to my feet. “It’s been wonderful. Really, it has.”

“It’s no hour to be walking home alone,” fretted Sansa. “Someone should make sure you get home safely.”

“Yes, of course,” added Robb quickly. “I’ll walk you.”

“No, that’s quite all right.”

“You’re sure? It’s dark. Safer in groups, you know.”

“Really, I’ll be fine.”

They reluctantly assented, but insisted on escorting me to the door. There we all huddled in the cramped hallway while I tugged on my overcoat, shuffling awkwardly around each other and exchanging a round or two of goodbyes. Robb was the last to bid me farewell.

“It’s been a splendid time. You’ll come again, won’t you?”

“If — if you’ll have me, I will.”

“Please do.” He shook my hand. As he did, I noticed for the first time the large gold signet ring he wore on his fourth finger which bore the crest of a snarling direwolf. I would have studied it further, but when he withdrew it flashed out of sight.

“Thanks for everything,” I said emphatically. “You’re a wonderful family.”

“Ah, well, we do our best.” He smiled. “Have a good night, Jon.”

How can the memory still be so potent now, with decades between us? And yet, it is: with perfect clarity I recall each of their smiling faces pressed together in the doorway, from the shine of Sansa’s hair to the rumpled crease of Arya’s collar to the particular way Bran’s glasses caught the light. Silhouetted against the firelight from the living room, they were suffused with an angelic tint, as though their beauty came not from their features but from some deep internal well of goodness.

On the way back to my dorm the night was cool and balmy. A warm wind trailed like a veil of gossamer against my skin. The stars were polished to a diamond sheen, and sieved silver light over the peaceful courtyards and lawns of Oxford, where wet leaves crunched underfoot, and the air smelled of dew. Somewhere, a jazz record was playing.

Perhaps this Arcadian idyll was an invention of my memory, or an embellishment on account of my good mood. In either case, all I can say is that it did indeed feel that way at the time. Walking back to my room that night, I felt a heightened sensitivity to beauty, as though I were an infant newly awoken to all the pleasures of the universe, still reeling in awe of how splendid the world could be.

***

That night was the beginning of my friendship with the Starks. To what surely would have been Loras’ unmitigated dread, I saw only more and more of them from there. By the end of Michaelmas, it would be a rare day in which at least one of them did not feature prominently. 

Part of it was simply Arya. She had decided, I think, that she and I would be friends, and she pursued that goal with the raw locomotive energy of a freight train. She tracked me down in the library and the dining hall, enlisted me in carrying her fencing gear, brought me to watch her fencing practices, and dragged me out to lunches where we dined on a Stark family tab. Together we played games of billiards and darts in swanky smoke-filled college bars where she was the only girl, and went out to extravagant parties where she drank any ten boys who cared to challenge her under the table. We climbed trees in the courtyard and sat in their boughs, drinking champagne and eating cucumber sandwiches like kings and queens of the forest. She never studied, nor did she express interest in the laurels of academia, but nevertheless had a sharp wit and a quick tongue, and anyone who mistook her brashness for stupidity was quickly and sometimes violently disabused of that notion. (Among my favorites of her well-worn tirades was the verbal blitzkrieg she would launch on anyone who made a comment about her pants.) She had a fast temper and a masculine tendency to use physical blows as gestures of affection. She was vulgar, careless, and brilliant fun.

It became apparent to me in time that Arya did not, as so many claimed, behave like a boy; she merely behaved like it didn’t matter whether she was one or not.

“Mother despairs of me,” she told me when I asked about it. Her tone was blasé. “She’s convinced I’ll never marry, and she’s likely right. Or if I do, it’ll be somebody she’ll loathe entirely, since I wouldn’t look twice at any of the boys she’s introduced me to for all the tea in China. But it’s just as well. I’d make a terrible housewife. I’m not interested in any of the things that housewives have to do — cooking, and cleaning, and ordering servants around. I’m sure some women love it to pieces, but it’s absolute death if you ask me.” She threw up her hands. “I’m like Robb. I can’t just  _sit_ somewhere all day. I’d rather have fun. I don’t see what my being a girl’s got to do with that.”

I couldn’t help but agree with her.

“She blames my father,” Arya added reflectively. “She thinks he gave me too much freedom when I was younger, and I turned out stubborn and mannish. Which is probably fair enough. But I like the way I am now. I’m happier, this way.”

I told her that I liked her stubborn and mannish, thank you very much. She grinned fearsomely.

“You’d better,” she said. “You’re my best friend, Jon Snow.”

I was flustered by this beyond words. I must have mumbled something embarrassed and grateful in reply, because I recall her laughing and then hauling me off for a beer.

But Arya was not the only one I saw more of. I spent many a long afternoon with Bran in the library, scribbling notes as he patiently explained some theorem or political gambit for the umpteenth time. Sometimes he pulled out his own research papers as reference texts, and upon reading them I was struck by the quality of the scholarship, which was as clear and intelligent as a tenured faculty member. He was, I realized, a bona fide genius, the kind of man that Oxford had been built to attract and create. He could speak to questions of science and maths as easily as those of civics and law, although he expounded with particular enthusiasm on the subject of literature. I began to privately agree with Robb that, while he was undoubtedly the best student in the Classics program by far, he was unforgivably wasted there.

“I read a lot,” was the simple answer given when interrogated as to the source of his brilliance.

“That’s it? You read?”

“Yes.”

I was unconvinced. It seemed that such intelligence had to come from something less mundane, such as divine providence or unfair hereditary gifts. “No, really.”

He gazed over his spectacles and down his nose at me, a judicious look which I was used to from my professors and was quite unprepared to find coming out of an adolescent’s face. “Jon,” he said dryly, gesturing at his legs, “what the devil else have I got to do?”

I relented, and went back to being soundly schooled on the subject of battle in classical antiquity.

Bran had been injured in a car accident when he was seven, and had been in a wheelchair for most of his life. Except for the occasional bit of trouble with stairs, he did not regard it as an impediment to his general lifestyle, and in fact took pleasure in speeding ahead of me on walks when the momentum of his wheels carried him faster than my mortal legs would allow.

“Simple joys, Jon,” he called over his shoulder when I caught up to him, hunched over and short of breath. “Simple joys.”

Of all the siblings I was least familiar with Sansa, who habitually kept different circles than I and would never have made so brash an opener as to seek me out in the library. I did run into her, though, now and then, and we spent a few quiet afternoons together over tea. She was, as it happened, one of the top students in the Classics program, virtually guaranteed for a First, and dizzyingly intelligent. She spoke four languages: English, French, Greek, and passive aggression. A devastating censure could be expressed in the way she set down her cup on her saucer. The twitch of her eyebrow could shred one’s pride. I understood with increasing clarity why it was that she and Arya did not agree with each other.

But she was also heartfelt, and sweet, and capable of enormous empathy. On my birthday, she took me to a bakery a few miles from Oxford and purchased for me a box of Northern pastries — not the light, buttery, and overly saccharine delicacies they served in the clubs around the school, but hearty pastries, rich with spices, like the kind which we had been given on special occasion at Castle Black. I did not realize until I bit one how much I had missed the flavor, and together we polished off the entire box that afternoon.

Robb was the heart and the head of the group. He, like Arya, had resolved to himself that I should be immediately and unceremoniously inducted into his life, and took every necessary measure to ensure it. His first effort at this was a vigorous campaign to get me to join the fencing team.

“If you can hold a sword, you’re ahead of most of them already,” he insisted. “I saw you spar with Arya, you’re not half bad, and once we get you used to a rapier instead of a two-hander—”

“I’ve already told you—”

“—you’d be perfect! And the boys are good folk, not the brightest maybe, but decent fellows, most of them. It’d spruce up your resume—”

“So after my ten years in the army, my employers will see I could fence?”

“—and it’s a great opportunity to make connections and meet people. Half of my friends I know from the team. More than half! Two-thirds. At least.”

“Tryouts ended in October.”

“I’m captain,” he scoffed.

I shook my head resolutely. “I’m flattered, but it’s not my game.”

He sighed. “Arya said you’d say that.”

Eventually he realized that fencing was not in the cards for me, and after similar campaigns for the debate team, the Union, and the Philosophical Society, he resigned himself to my dreadful lack of extracurricular motivation. Nevertheless, he still shanghaied me into attending meetings with him, often taking great enjoyment in announcing, “This is my cousin, Jon,” or “Has anyone not met my dear friend, Jon?” to the general assembly. He found my embarrassment at this habit highly amusing, and probably took it as encouragement.

He owned a car, a gleaming 1923 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost in funeral black, and when begged or cajoled would relent to take his siblings and me on rides along the Isis. With the five of us it was a tight fit, usually settled by some arrangement where Robb and Sansa sat up front and I squeezed in with Arya and Bran in the backseat. (Arya occasionally could be prevailed upon to hang on to the back, if it was a short trip.) We put Bran’s chair in the boot and then off we trundled, taking lazy rides with no particular direction while the gray stripe of the river raced alongside us and the sky opened up like a cornflower watercolor above. Robb grumbled the whole time about being made a chauffeur and pack horse for his own family, but he secretly enjoyed it, and spent the whole ride back to Oxford reciting pieces of pastoral poetry or remarking on the quality of the fresh country air.

It was around this time that I made the acquaintance of Daenerys Targaryen.

I was taking Latin, for some reason that had probably been clear to me at the beginning of the term but had disappeared altogether by November. It was going less than desirably. I received a tip-off from one of my friends in the class that if I wanted some help, I could apply for tutoring from the professor’s assistant, a fearsome senior undergraduate who was as known for her command of the language as her thankless performance standards and intolerance for laziness. I should beware, though, my friend warned, for she was not going to go lightly on me, and I should only submit myself to her tutelage in a case of dire need.

Having been educated at a military academy, I was understandably unfazed by the prospect of harsh rhetoric, and signed up for her tutoring sessions posthaste.

We arranged to meet in the library at two P.M. on a Friday. She was already at our table when I arrived, with her books stacked neatly in a pile and a tea set waiting to her left. A long, thick braid of platinum white, startling in its absence of color, wound over her left shoulder. She wore a cream silk blouse and a jacket of blue-gray tweed hung neatly from the back of her chair.

As I approached she looked up from her writing. Her eyes were a very dark shade of blue, and turned indigo in dim light. I was rather fascinated by them. “Hello,” she said, in a clear, businesslike Eton accent. “Are you Jon Snow?”

“Yes. Er, nice to meet you.”

“I’m Daenerys Targaryen,” she said. Each syllable leapt from her mouth with equal articulacy and emphasis, as though she were giving me very important instructions and expected me not to mess them up. “Sit.”

She shook my hand. I sat.

“Let’s begin with this week’s translations. I should get an idea for where you are in the course before we move forward. Have you made much headway on your Cicero?”

“Some,” I said, guiltily. 

She looked at me.

“Er, no. None, yet.”

“Well, we’ll do those now, then,” she said smoothly, and pulled the first book from her stack. “Also, we should speak in Latin from now on. Regular conversation is the quickest path to fluency.”

“Good idea,” I said, neglecting to mention the fact that I had absolutely no ability to carry on a conversation in Latin.

“Trahere de libro tuo quem scripsisti. Et ego faciam in prima translatione, quantum est tibi, et tu alterum facere.” Her Latin was fluid and evocative as a first language, and heartbreakingly perfect. I was doomed.

Catastrophically, the moment of truth arrived sooner than I expected. She waited for a response, then repeated herself, more slowly. “Jon? Trahere de libro tuo quem scripsisti.”

I glanced away, hoping that she might take pity on me and repeat herself in English.

“ Ecquid intellegis me ?” I did not reply. “ Noli me dicens quid intellegis ?”

Under the relentless burn of her gaze, I fought the juvenile urge to squirm in my seat.

She sat back, setting down her pen. We regarded each other. I like to think that in that moment, we were both equally disappointed in me.

“You can’t speak Latin,” she said flatly.

“No.”

“All right.”

“Sorry.”

“You should have told me,” she said, flipping back quite a few pages in her book. “We could have started with the basics, instead.”

“I know more than the basics.” I was compelled to defend myself at least that much. “I can say hello, and goodbye, and the pleasantries.”

“Which is not much.”

“Well, it’s something.”

“But not much.”

“I figured I’d catch up to you eventually,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “Once I got my bearings.”

“What I’m more interested in is why you bothered pretending anything else,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like I thought you were here because you were particularly good at it. Otherwise, you’d be a waste of my time.”

“I’m not bad at it,” I said, insulted.

“Yes, you are,” she said patiently. “You’re three months into a Latin class and you can’t say more than ‘hello,’ ‘goodbye,’ and pleasantries. What do you think that means?”

“It means I had better things to do, I guess—”

“Jon,” she said. Her voice stripped me down, pinned me to my seat, and put a knife to my sternum before warning me about the potential hazards of continuing to speak. “I’ll only say this once.”

I braced myself for the severe dressing-down which I probably deserved. Instead, she put her hand on mine, and spoke gently. “There’s nothing wrong with a student who doesn’t know,” she said. “Only with one who doesn’t try. Latin is a very difficult language, and those who fall behind in it stand very little chance of catching up without help. I will not tolerate the association of having difficulties with being a failure. I will  _absolutely_ not tolerate being cruel to yourself, or to me, for it. Am I understood?”

Her eyes were deep and infinitely kind. A tight and rather uncomfortable feeling blossomed in my chest, as though a flower had taken up root rather close in residence to my heart, and its vines were slowly encircling the organ.

“Perfectly,” I said.

“Good.” She smiled. I wondered, absently, if she knew how dangerous that expression was when rendered on her face; it was the kind of thing which could induce a heart attack.

She pushed her book across the table so I could see it, and we set to work.

Over the course of several weeks, I met with her every Tuesday and Friday at two. During these precious parcels of time I cannot honestly say my Latin improved much, but I did make an honest effort, which she appreciated, and more importantly, I gleaned various pieces of information about Daenerys. I learned, for instance, that she was the only daughter of a noble family which due to a set of enigmatic circumstances no longer held any political power, but maintained its great wealth. I learned she had two brothers, one of whom had died in the war and the other of whom dropped out of Oxford at nineteen to go drink himself silly in the south of France, and that her mother and father had both died when she was very young. I learned she was funny. I learned she lived in Sebastian’s College, read for PPE, wanted a career in government, spoke even more languages than Sansa, preferred coffee to tea, enjoyed string music, tolerated opera, and did not, in fact, have a boyfriend.

“Not,” she added, with a delicate flourish of her pen, “that it is any of your business.”

“Oh, of course not,” I agreed readily, and she spared me a smile over the rim of her cup.


	4. Chapter 4

_Oh Youth! The ambrosia of life be Thine  
When I with friends do share the time so sweet  
When youthful hearts at heav’nly feasting meet  
And golden threads around them all entwine._

—Adam Mickiewicz, “Ode to Joy”

* * *

In November, the weather seemed to remember that it was, in fact, English, and hurried to make up for its past neglect by hurling a bevy of rainstorms at us just as we were preparing for our final exams. Gone were the days of picnics on the quad and merry strolls through the Botanical Gardens. Come instead were the long afternoons hunched in the library while rain lashed the windows, mad dashes across the wet courtyards with books brandished hopelessly over our heads, and wearing socks to bed for fear of draft. Our lives became narrated by the perpetual gurgle of drainpipes and the moan of wind against the walls.

While this suited Bran and Sansa just fine, it was intolerable to Arya, who I believe fed as much on sunlight as a tropical plant. Now limited in the scope of her adventures, she took to accompanying Bran, Sansa and I on our trips to the library, not to study, but for desperate want of something to do. Usually this turned out to be distracting me from my studies, which was at least half as much my fault as it was hers; I was a better playmate than student, and I all too gladly allowed myself to be lured away from nominative declensions.

On one particular morning, we were having a heated debate over the  _Iliad,_ which was to say that Sansa and Bran were having a heated debate over the  _Iliad,_ and Arya and I were engaged in an equally heated contest of wills over who could erect the tallest sugar cube tower.

“You’re supposed to think he’s being unreasonable,” said Bran, stabbing his finger at the book as though he intended to bore through it and impale the table underneath. “That’s the point. He’s angry, and he’s not  _thinking_ clearly, and Patroclus just died, so he decides to do something awful.”

“But the gods wouldn’t have let him  _do_ it if we were supposed to think it was unjust,” Sansa said, throwing up her hands as if to appeal to those very gods for aid. “Achilles is the favorite of the gods — Homer  _tells_ us and  _tells_ us — if he was wrong, there would be signs, plagues, omens, like in Antigone and the Odyssey—”

“The gods  _aren’t_ just! That’s the  _point of the poem!”_

“Not themselves, no,” Sansa said irritably. “Obviously! But they’re the keepers of justice. They’re supposed to punish people when they get it wrong. And anyway, Achilles got it right in the end; he does bury Hector.”

Arya made a Hail Mary bid to topple my sugar cube tower by leveling it with her teaspoon, which I parried by use of the cream pot for a shield.

“What the fuck’s left to bury of him? You try dragging a corpse behind your chariot for a while, see what’s left.”

“Language!”

“Fine. But I’m right.”

“Achilles is a hero,” she said fiercely. My sugar cube tower wavered and then, with a tragic quiver, swooned to the ground. Arya let out a muffled crow of victory. “The gods wanted justice for Patroclus, so they kept Achilles alive. Homer is saying that justice is more important than civility.”

“If you’re right, Homer is saying that justice is more important than  _anything._ ” Bran gestured with elaborate disgust at the text. “More than life, or dignity, or honor. Even more than basic respect for the dead.”

“No,” Arya said absently, surprising all three of us. She settled another sugar cube with exacting delicacy atop her tower, which bore the weight flawlessly. “It’s just more important than us.”

Nobody, least of all me, had expected her to be paying attention; by all accounts, this was her least favorite kind of conversation, focused as it was on something old, traditional, and beloved by Sansa. 

Arya dusted the sugar off her hands with businesslike aplomb. “Hector has to die, and Achilles has to kill him. It’s not about personal honor, it’s a question of moral law.”

Bran and I exchanged slack-jawed looks. I do not think, until that moment, that anyone at the table had believed Arya had read the  _Iliad,_ much less formed a coherent opinion on its subtext.

Sansa coughed. Arya glanced up, her cheeks warming, and lifted her chin. “What? I can  _read.”_

We hastily and clumsily averred that naturally, yes, certainly, no one had doubted that she could, and retreated with shame into our own private activities.

Before I could get my teeth into Latin’s accusative cases, a distantly familiar girl with yellow hair rose from her table across the room and approached our own. Her dress was of an elaborate burgundy brocade, trimmed with gold, and she wore a string of evening pearls. Sansa would later tell me that this was in all likelihood an intentional gesture — it suggested that her family was of sufficient wealth to consider pearls an element of casual day dress.

She walked with a slinking sort of step, hips moving in a catlike figure-eight, until she came to a halt at our own table and looked down at us with the sort of expression one reserved for a bit of hair found in one’s tea.

“Morning, Starks,” she said. Her voice was high and nasal and quite familiar.

“Good morning, Cersei,” said Sansa. Neither of them sounded very happy to see each other.

“You haven’t introduced me to your new attaché,” she said, and because she would not look at me, it only occurred to me belatedly that I was the individual in question. “I feel terribly left out, if you must know. I had to learn from Jaime about the new head in your little… cadre.” The word crawled out of her throat, trembled on the edge of her tongue, and then dropped with oily malice from her lips.

“We haven’t posted the banns yet,” Bran said dryly.

“Well, you’d better soon, hadn’t you? If it’s gotten around to me, goodness knows who else has heard.”

“This is Jon,” said Arya roughly. “What d’you want with him?”

Cersei turned to me. In her gaze I felt like a horsefly under the encroaching shadow of a newspaper. “Jon Stark?” she said sweetly.

Sansa glanced at me, stricken. Bran’s face was dark. I dared not find out what Arya’s was doing. “No,” I said, quietly.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. Karstark, then. Or Umber? I get them confused.”

“Not either.”

She paused. “But you look so much like them,” she said, gesturing to the Starks, airy and confused.

“So I’m told,” I mumbled.

“Now, I would guess Bolton, but given the company you keep—”

Arya shoved back her chair. “You know damn well what his name is,” she said.

Cersei’s eyebrow lifted with the controlled grace of a ballerina’s foot. “Lady Arya,” she said slowly. “How are you? It’s been some seasons since we spoke.”

“Yeah, too few of them.”

“Mm. How is that dog of yours? Have they put her down yet?” Without waiting for an answer, Cersei rounded again on me. “You are putting me through my paces, Jon. I’m running out of Northern houses. Unless you’re from one of the lesser ones, which I haven’t a chance of remembering; but how could you be, with that coloring? You’re the spitting image of Ned. You really must tell me straight, or I’ll never guess.”

“Cersei,” Sansa said, both a plea and a reprimand. A heat broke out on the back of my neck.

“My name’s Jon Snow, my lady,” I said, as calmly as I could.

Her mouth dropped open in a perfect ‘O’. “Oh, dear,” she said, and touched one hand to her chest. “Oh, I am sorry. I never meant to bring up such awkwardness. You must forgive me. I don’t know you; it was an honest mistake.”

The worst part was, I couldn’t prove that she was lying. It was entirely plausible that she didn’t know me, and had mistaken my coloring for Stark, and that she had introduced herself only out of a desire to acquaint herself with someone she didn’t yet know. There was just enough deniability in her conduct, her wide-eyed performance of shock and deliberate naïveté of manner, to believe that she really was simply ill-informed and well-intentioned. In short, she was just convincing enough that I could not rightly call her a liar without making an arse of myself.

She smiled, as if she had heard these very thoughts. “Are you Ned’s?”

A white blank tore across my thoughts. I could hear nothing but a low hum, and saw nothing but the cool green of Cersei’s eyes. Distantly, I heard Arya knock her chair to the ground and Sansa let out an astonished gasp.

“Take it back,” said Arya.

“Well, he has to come from somewhere,” said Cersei softly.

“Take it back or I’ll make you.”

“Fascinated as I am to learn how you intend to do that,” she said, “I take it from your reaction that he’s not.”

“I’m Lyanna’s son,” I interrupted, drawing the attention of all at the table to me. “I doubt you’d know her. She died when I was very young.”

My cousins’ faces were a mosaic of horror and guilt. I stared at Cersei, whose mouth had pinched in unease.

“That’s whose bastard I am,” I said. “If that answers your question.”

My forthrightness seemed to take her aback. It took her a slightly longer second than usual to gain her composure. “Yes,” she said, a tad shortly. “Well. I respect your honesty, Jon. It’s a noble thing, to be willing to speak openly of such—”

“Speaking of discretion,” Sansa said coolly, “how is Tyrion, Cersei? A friend tells me he’s been frequenting some darling little hotel in south London that rents by the hour.”

It was the most remarkable thing. It was as if someone had taken a shear to Cersei’s puppet strings, and she was left standing only by the sheer force of will it took not to collapse. Her shoulders inched upwards. The gentle shape of her features hardened. In stiff tones, she replied, “I am not my brother’s keeper. I’m sure I don’t know where all he goes.”

“How anxious that must make you,” Sansa said lightly. “Well. I’m glad we caught each other, but I do have a monstrous essay that I simply must work on. Send my very fondest to Jaime, et cetera.”

“And mine to Robb,” said Cersei, all fury.

“Thank you. I will.”

They exchanged identical loveless smiles. Then Cersei whirled and left, her footsteps quick and short on the hardwood.

“Exit Lady Macbeth,” Bran muttered.

I opened my mouth, probably with a querulous expression, and Sansa cut me off at the pass. “Tyrion’s her brother,” she sighed, sitting back in her chair. “A bit of a family embarrassment, for several reasons. It was low of me to go for the throat like that, but with Cersei there’s really no other way to go.”

“I can see that,” I said hoarsely.

“I would have just decked her,” Arya said indifferently.

“Yes, I know.” Sansa rubbed her eyes. “That’s why I did it.”

“Did you hear what she said about Father?”

“Of course I did. I was sitting right here.”

“Did you hear what she said about Jon?”

“Yes, Arya, I do remember the last five minutes, thank you.”

“I should’ve hit her.”

“No, you shouldn’t have.”

“Well, someone ought to!”

I cleared my throat. “So, that just now,” I said. “With me. Is she always…?”

“Yes,” Sansa said tiredly. “Very.”

I nodded, and listened with great affection as Arya went on to abuse Cersei for the better part of an hour on my behalf. I applauded her. I shared in their taunts. We agreed, multiple times and with great aplomb, that living with her must be nothing short of a nightmare. But privately, my heart was not in it. I wondered to myself, in the ensuing hours and days, what kind of a childhood — what untold years of cruelty and sadness — could allow a creature like that to come to exist. It seemed to me that nothing except loneliness could make someone so desperately and obviously unhappy.

It occurs to me only in retrospect that it would have been the very height of shame for Cersei Lannister to know she had been pitied by a bastard.

***

Thus far in the term I had rarely occasioned to see Loras’ friends. Usually, when Friday nights swung around, we would dress and go our separate ways early in the evening, without encountering each other’s parties. In those first nascent days of autumn he had gamely invited me along with him, but between my initial fear of intruding and later, almost constant occupation with the Starks, I never had chance to accept one. I knew vaguely that he kept the company of some rather important society people, but aside from that I was woefully ignorant of all things concerning him.

It was therefore a surprise, when I returned to my dorm that night, to find it three times as full as anticipated. Loras was there, but so too was a dark-haired boy with brawny shoulders and a full beard, lounging regally in our room’s sole armchair, and a very pretty brunette in a deep-necked dress who happened to be sitting barefoot on my bed.

Both men stood when I walked in; the girl arched her neck to see. “Oh, hello, Jon,” Loras said, as if he was trying to reach the people sitting in the back. “Fancy seeing you.”

I politely sidestepped the obvious fact that it was my room. “Sorry if I’ve interrupted,” I began.

“No! Please! Sit.” He gestured to my bed, which complicated things. I could not very well ask the girl to move, as such would be ungentlemanly and awkward besides, but neither did I feel quite comfortable sitting there while she was on it, especially stretched out as she was. I ended up leaning jauntily with one hip against the bedpost and an arm cocked on the headboard.

“Jon, this is Renly Baratheon,” Loras said, stressing the last word significantly more than the first. He gestured at the dark-haired man. “I don’t think you two have met each other. And this is Margaery — my sister.”

“It’s an absolute pleasure,” murmured Margaery. I stammered something to the same effect. 

“Hello,” said Renly pleasantly. “Loras tells me you’re reading for history. I am, too.”

“Oh? That’s a neat coincidence.”

“Rather. What’s your specialty? I’m partial to the Romans, myself, although one does lose his appetite after reading about them.”

“Greeks.”

“Greeks! Wonderful people,” Margaery exclaimed, as if she knew each one personally. “So much fun. All the drinking, and dancing, and merriment. Now, there’s a civilization with the right idea.”

“As Margaery says,” said Loras. He perched on the arm of Renly’s chair. “Exactly so. You know, Jon’s a great historian.” I was not. “He’ll make First if he only applies himself, I’d put a hundred pounds on it.” He looked at me, and I got the sensation that some higher level of the conversation was entirely passing me by.

“Everybody says he’ll make First if he only applies himself,” Renly drawled good-naturedly. “Every Third who ever sat an exam went out muttering that he’d have been First easily if he’d only applied himself. Can’t say I believe it. Not anything against you, though, Jon,” he added generously.

“No, of course.”

“Renly’s going to make First,” Margaery assured me. “He’s a great student, terribly boring. Never takes me out at  _all_ .” She threw her head back dramatically, exposing the long white line of her neck. 

“I took you out yesterday,” he laughed.

“And not once today! I’m withering. In my prime, no less.”

“If that’s you withering, I shan’t weep for you,” he said, indicating her figure with a guileless hand. “And if I take you and your brother out any more than I already do, the pair of you will run me ragged. It’s absolutely too much for a man.”

Margaery sat up and scooted closer to me. “Renly’s a bad boyfriend,” she confided seriously. “Really terrible. You ought to steal me away; I’m quite desperate, you know.” The twinkle in her eye made it clear that she was joking, but a loaded undercurrent in her tone made me uneasy. 

“Jon, if you can handle Margaery, you’re free to her,” Renly said sincerely. She gave an indignant whine and blew a raspberry at him. “You have my fondest blessings and felicitations. Fly far, sweet lovebirds, and may you never mourn a minute of your lost sleep.”

“Renly and Margaery are engaged,” said Loras suddenly. “Have been for ages. Jon, have you got a girl?”

Three pairs of inquiring eyes landed with concussive force on my face. “Well, not presently,” I said uncomfortably. “I’ve been focusing on—”

“Of course he hasn’t,” Margaery said smoothly. “He’s been running around with his cousins for half the term. That’d be enough to put a dent in anyone’s love life.” She nudged me. “Haven’t you?”

“I mean — yes.”

“Who’re his cousins?” Renly inquired.

“The Starks,” said Loras.

“The Starks?” Renly frowned. “Odd sort, aren’t they? Reclusive.”

“Withdrawn,” Loras agreed, nodding. “Hermitic.”

“Not really, if you get to know them,” I said stiffly.

“Cloistered,” said Loras. “Ascetics.”

“Jon,” Margaery said, turning to me, “I’ve just had the best idea. You should come with us next weekend — to Highgarden.”

I blinked. An invitation to the Tyrell’s estate was a coveted token among freshers, particularly those with few social prospects. It was said that the parties thrown there were absolute bacchanals, spectacular eight-hour carnivals of food and music and entertainment, attended by the most glamorous people in England at any given moment and stocked with enough alcohol to float a barge.

“That’s kind of you,” I said, bemused. Flattering as it was, I wasn’t particularly interested in going to a party where I wouldn’t know anyone and would almost certainly be the poorest person in attendance. Also — although I doubted they would accept this excuse — I had promised to take Arya punting next Saturday, and I feared the wrath which might befall me if I broke my vow to her.

“Never mind that. Will you come?” Her pretty face turned up hopefully towards mine, and I struggled to produce a good reason that I couldn’t come.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“No,” she said, dismayed, and Loras gave a corresponding grunt of disappointment. “Why not?”

“It’s finals week soon. I’ve got to study.”

“Study there,” she said impishly.

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

“Come anyway!”

“Really, I couldn’t possibly.”

“Jon, don’t be thick,” Loras said, still doing that thing where he stressed the odd word. “Come with us.”

“Thank you, again. But no.”

“It’s a real shame,” said Renly unexpectedly. “Are you sure we can’t tempt you?” He glanced at Loras, who was staring at me.

“Yes. Rather. Thanks, though.”

Silence reigned. At this awkward interval in the conversation I decided it was best to remove myself, and went to get my hat. We had a round of stiff goodbyes, and then I stepped out into the hallway, feeling sweaty and eager to be as far away from their company as possible.

Before I could make such an exit, the door swung again and Loras came hurrying out of the room, calling my name. Resigned, I turned around.

“What is it?” If my tone was ungracious, merely consider the facts: I had returned to my room after a long day to find awaiting a veritable social ambush, and now had been ousted from that very room for at least a few hours more so that the ambushers could enjoy some reprieve from my company. I was not in fine spirits with Loras.

“Well, what do you think of them?” he asked pointedly.

“What?”

“Renly and Margaery. What do you think?”

I had little patience remaining for pussyfooting the issue. “I think they’re nice people,” I snapped, “and perfectly fine folks, I’m sure, but I don’t know what  _that_ was supposed to be about—”

“That? Just a little introduction,” he said quickly. “They wanted to meet you, and I obliged them. You aren’t cross, are you?”

“No, but I don’t see why you had to set up in my room like some Moroccan guerrilla joint.”

“That’s entirely inaccurate,” he said, with some offense. “And anyway, you should have taken Margaery’s invitation. It would have been a great use of a weekend. Everybody loves Highgarden.”

“Yes, I know, but I really do have to study, Loras.”

“Are you sure?” He gave me a searching look. “Is that what you’re doing?”

I threw up my hands. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? What did  _any_ of that mean? Good Lord, why don’t any of you just say what you think, it’d save us all a great deal of time—”

“It means I think you ought to look at what you’re doing with your time here,” he snapped, “and consider whether it’s the best choice. Renly and Margaery are good, reputable folk, and going out with them will do marvelous things for your image—”

“Oh, so that’s it, then.” My irritation had almost entirely eaten up its fuse and was fast igniting into anger. “It’s about the Starks.”

“It’s not about anybody but you.”

“No? Really? How about this, then,” I said tightly. “How about this. I go out with the Starks because I  _like_ them. I like their kind of people, disreputable or not. I like being hermitic with them. I don’t care if I make enemies. I’m a bastard, if you haven’t noticed. People are going to sneer at me no matter what, so I might as well do what I like.”

“I’m trying to help you, Jon,” he hissed, attempting to move closer. I took a quick step back and brushed him off.

“Got that, thanks ever so,” I said. “Next time, ask. Save yourself some effort. Have fun at Highgarden.”

With that, I turned my back on him and swept at a loaded march down the hall. It was deeply satisfying.

***

Only three days after my altercation with Loras, I was walking down High Street — on my way to the club for a spot of breakfast — when a familiar black car came tearing up the street, swerved into the wrong lane to pull up curbside, and screeched to a halt next to me.

The front passenger door flew open. “Get in,” Robb said. His eyes danced.

“Sorry, what?”

“Get in, dolt,” called Arya. She was squeezed between Sansa and Bran in the back, I presume so that I could be more hastily boarded in the front seat. “Or we’ll take you by force.”

“Where are we going?”

“Nosy, nosy! Answers are for good boys who get in the car.”

“I’m sitting in the wrong lane, Jon,” Robb reminded me patiently, and finally accepting the life that I had brought upon myself, I hastened onboard.

No sooner had my foot left the pavement than we were roaring off again. I hauled the door shut as we careened into the proper lane and flew down High Street, making a sharp left and then breezing past a stop sign.

“We’ve decided to kidnap you,” Robb informed me gravely. “You’re to have no contact with anyone but us for the next twenty-four hours. Strictly enforced.”

“Twenty-four — aren’t we coming back to the college?”

“Oh, in a while,” he said cheerfully, and unhelpfully.

“I haven’t got any bags!”

“Shan’t need them, where we’re going.”

I had the terrified notion that I had been roped into their merry plan to drive off a cliff. I could see old Colonel Aemon shaking his head in disappointment at my funeral:  _Ah, but he would have been such a fine soldier, if he had any shred of backbone!_

“I’m sorry, but where—?”

“We’re going to Winterfell,” announced Robb. 

On his lips the word seemed to tremble with a special significance, like an ancient incantation or a secret spell, a promise and an invocation of great things passed and still greater things that lingered around the corner. Winterfell: the mecca, the secret garden, the grail of my youth. The castle in the clouds, the house of dreams.

“Really?”

“Day trip,” said Sansa breathlessly. The wind tore rabidly at her hair from the speed of Robb’s driving and she had to keep one hand firmly affixed to her hat. “If we hurry, we’ll arrive just after lunch. Then we’ll come back early tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, I know it’s last-minute, but it was a last-minute sort of thing.”

I assured her that I had no objections. Inconvenient as it might have been, this was simply the way the Starks tended to live. An idea took hold of one of them, and like wildfire over dry brush, it immediately inflamed the rest of them with equal fervor, until their own urgency of will and collective desire left them with no choice but to do it. It was not their design to live so quickly. They were merely people of enormous inertia, barreling through life with the inexorable arc of planets around the sun.

We drove into the country, heading north along narrow roads fletched with poplar trees. Robb drove with the haste of a dying man. We whipped dizzying turns around corners and thundered across old bridges, the wind snapping at our faces, our hair whipping into wild snarls, and all while the engine sang merrily under his expert care. I enjoyed sitting in the front seat for once, and only grew queasy a few times.

“So, your house,” I called. All attempts at conversation had to be shouted, or the wind would swallow them whole. “Does your family live there year-round?”

Robb said, “We do. Mother likes to visit with our Aunt Lysa for a month every summer in York, and Father keeps a villa in the south of France for vacations, but home is always Winterfell.”

“So they’ll be there today?”

“Oh! No, don’t worry. They won’t be. Father’s on a business trip to London, and he took Mother and Rickon along.” Their youngest brother, a twelve-year-old boy who had been born quite unexpectedly some six years after Bran, was being homeschooled, as each of them had been.

Robb mistook my disappointment for anxiety. “You won’t have to meet them,” he told me.

“But I should like to.”

“Well, you can’t, not today.”

We drove on, stopping only once for lunch at a pub in a somewhat desolate little town called Moat Cailin, and arrived early in the afternoon. Robb turned off the main road and we trundled down a paved drive until we came to a pair of wrought-iron gates which rose in forbidding, toothy grandeur from the earth. At their heart was the emblem of a snarling wolf. We passed through and zipped under a dappled glade of oak trees, their boughs entwined to create a ceiling for the road, turned a corner, crested a hill, and then suddenly a secret valley opened up beneath us in glorious form, its grasses lush and emerald, marbled with the sapphire of a small creek. At the heart of the valley was a massive stone castle, stacked with high turrets and wide, circular towers, which in the afternoon sun cast a shadow long enough to fit three houses in its wake.

“There she is,” said Robb, with proprietary affection. “What do you think of her?”

“You live here?”

“Whenever we’re not at Oxford.”

We descended into the valley and glided through two miles of gardens before we looped into the driveway, which curled to a rest at the foot of two massive oak doors and cradled a marble fountain in its arms. Over the entrance there was an inscription in the stone which read  _VENTURAEQUE HIEMIS_ . 

Robb parked the car. “I’ll leave it here,” he said, “since we’re only staying for the day,” and then we all scrambled out and went in.

There was a brief war over who was to give me the grand tour, which Sansa settled by pointing out that it would be impossible to show me even most of Winterfell within a day, and we settled for a quick show of the important rooms. There was the Great Hall, a cavernous room with French windows and no less than seven ornate chandeliers, used for entertaining. There was the dining room, a narrow chamber with walls of gilded marble holding a table around which were positioned some fifty or sixty chairs. Then there were the parlor, living room, library, and kitchen, each of which was dressed in dark oaks and lush jewel tone wallpapers, crown molding, gold sconces, oil paintings with legendary signatures, and gleaming hardwood floors polished to a reflective capacity. Of guest rooms they had dozens, and an entire wing of the castle dedicated solely to their parents’ habitation, the doors of which were locked while I was there.

Then they insisted that I be taken out to the gardens, and I let myself be half-carried out of the house and through several interlocking courtyards. It soon became apparent that they deliberately employed ‘gardens’ in the plural, for in the fields behind the house there were many kinds — flower gardens and vegetable gardens and herb gardens, each fenced by a row of pinecone hedges, water gardens with fountains sculpted in the images of Greek heroes, and a vast greenhouse. Beyond that still there was a stable, and as we approached it Arya sprang ahead of us and let out a high whistle. To my shock, the doors flew open, and out bounded a pair of enormous, slavering dogs, each the size of a small horse, their jaws snapping and chilling bays tearing from their throat.

I cried out and stumbled back. But Arya ran headlong towards them, her arms flung wide in offer of an embrace, and sure enough, one of the dogs barreled into her eagerly, knocking both to the ground in an unruly tangle of man and beast, letting out a delighted trail of high yips.

The other dog shot in a dead sprint across the field towards us, launched itself into midair, and flung itself with wild joy into Robb’s arms. He staggered a bit, laughing, as it toppled down and then frantically hopped up on its hind legs — it was almost taller than him, standing — to lick his face, giving him a barrage of kisses. He scratched between its ears, and its tail beat furiously in an ecstasy of love.

Behind them came two more, these ones trotting at a more sedate pace, who went to Bran and Sansa. Bran’s carefully balanced its front legs on the arms of his wheelchair and gave him one very distinguished lick to the cheek. Sansa’s laved politely at her hand. I gathered, after my heart slowed to a regular rhythm, that they were pets.

Robb managed to wrestle his dog off his face and turned to me. “Sorry about the fright,” he said, grinning. “We forget they can be intimidating, to other people. They’re very well behaved, though. Want to pet him?”

The dog gazed hopefully at me. Its tongue lolled.

“No, thank you,” I said, still somewhat put off by the size. “I’m sure he’s very good, but, er. No.”

“That’s all right. Most people say that.” He called to Arya, “What say we take Jon for a ride around the grounds?”

She wrestled her dog off and hauled herself to her feet. “Grand idea,” she said. “I’ll get the horses.”

They each had their own mount, a glossy-coated racing thoroughbred. Robb rode a grey stallion, Arya a black one, and Sansa and Bran a pair of good-tempered chestnut mares which were twins. I was given Ned Stark’s white mare. We set off at a canter over the fields, passing in between copses of beech trees and riding for a while along the pebbled banks of the creek, our breath turning to mist in the clear but frigid autumn sun. The dogs bounded along beside us, and although at first I worried about unnerving our mounts, the horses seemed utterly immune to their presence. Indeed, Arya’s dog, Nymeria, went so far as to weave devilishly in and out of her stallion’s legs while walked, but earned no greater reprimand than an annoyed chuff from the larger animal.

It was Arya who broke our rhythm. After near an hour of calm trotting, she cast a mischievous glance over her shoulder at me. Patting her mount on the side, she cried, “Last one to the house is a rotten egg!” and galloped off across the fields, Nymeria bounding at her heels.

Robb laughed. “Sorry, Jon,” he said, nudging his mount into action. “You heard the lady. It’s a shame to trounce a guest, but a man of my honor can’t turn down a challenge.”

I laughed a little, despite myself. “You’ve got bigger things to worry about than your honor,” I said, “like losing.” And I brushed my heel against the mare’s flank.

She shot forward like a bullet. I clung to the reins and mane for dear life as she bounded without pause, her legs pumping in a blur of grey and white as we soared across the landscape. Green flew past on either side. Brush exploded under her hooves. Our speed stole the breath from my lungs. She bounded logs, zipped around trees, and leapt with a stomach-dropping jump over the stream itself, landing dry on the other side without so much as missing a step.

Behind me, I heard Robb cackling. “That’s not fair,” he called. “You’ve got Father’s horse!”

But soon I could not hear him. I was gaining on Arya. She twisted over her shoulder, saw me, and grinned fiercely. I grinned back.

We broke through the glades and erupted onto an open field, galloping neck and neck through a sea of verdant grass. The wide rolling hills and pale sky caged us. Our shadows swam in the earth. The air tasted sweet and clear, and our horses were fast and warm beneath us, and at the end of our course sat Winterfell, its stone face painted gold in the afternoon light. I felt a great lightness bubble up through my veins, like the crisp fizz which tops a glass of champagne. Past and future fell away in my wake. It seemed that there had never been anything, nor would there be anything, except this moment, and its perfect, unconquerable happiness.

Arya did beat me, but only by a hair, and we argued about it for the rest of the afternoon. Once we had turned the horses in, Sansa proposed that we swim — they had a pool, installed only a few years ago as an eighteenth birthday gift to Robb — but the others agreed that it was much too cold, and we went inside for some mulled wine. Bran wheedled me into a game of chess, which all advised against but I accepted anyway, and I was, predictably, badly beaten. Sansa and I played euchre, with Bran occasionally helping me from the sidelines, a game which somehow transitioned into poker with the appearance of Arya. It concluded in a bloody shutdown in Bran’s favor; he could do things to a pack of cards that ought to have been illegal, and probably were in most civilized states. Then we opened a bottle of wine and went spelunking in the upstairs, hunting for entertainment, and found none but discovered quite a few sets of ghostly rooms with their furniture draped in white. At some point in the afternoon someone had put a record on somewhere, and languid strands of jazz dripped like molasses through the walls. 

In the evening we all napped on sofas, and when we rose it was almost seven o’clock. There was some food in the kitchen, which through the combined efforts of Sansa and Robb was resurrected into something both deemed halfway edible, and in order to enhance the sensation of the meal we all dressed in our best finery. I borrowed a suit of Robb’s, which was loose in the shoulders but otherwise very smart, and we sat down to a dinner of braised pork, ice cream, and champagne.

After dinner we wandered out half-drunk into the godswood, which housed the family crypt and also a small sept. It was oddly asynchronous with the rest of the house, which was very much an artifact of the old North, and may as well have held the spirits of the Old Gods themselves.

“Oh, that,” said Robb. “It was Father’s wedding present to Mother. Do you want to look inside?”

I said yes, and the two of us broke away from the other three, who lay stargazing on the paddock beneath the family Weirwood tree.

The sept was grand for its size. A domed roof perched on a set of seven columns, and a relief of the gods was carved over the entrance. Inside, three rows of pews flanked either side of a grass-green aisle, which terminated in a high altar and a shrine to the Maiden. Stained-glass murals decorated each of the sept’s seven walls, and a full, human-sized sculpture of one of each of the Seven stood guard at each corner of the room. A brigade of candles guttered quietly on the table at the altar. For all its beauty, it struck me as homely and naked. There were no personal touches, no lavish decorations like those in the sept at Oxford.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Robb. His voice echoed on the stone. 

“It’s lovely.”

“Mother comes here on days of prayer.” He brushed his fingers across one of the pews, wandering aimlessly down the aisle. “They were married under the Weirwood, but Father thought she might like to have somewhere for her own faith.”

“She didn’t convert?”

“No. Our faith doesn’t demand it. Anyone can be married in the eyes of the old gods. It’s only the Seven that ask you to convert.”

“It was kind of him to build this for her.”

“Yes. Father’s a good man.” He seemed distracted; he kept touching and twisting his signet ring.

“Is something the matter?”

“No. It’s nothing, nothing to worry about.”

“Clearly it is, if it’s bothering you.”

“Yes, well. Hm.” He paced to the alter, turned, and came back. “I heard Cersei Lannister gave you a bit of trouble the other day,” he said abruptly.

I paused, remembering the incident. Frankly, it had not since crossed my mind. “Yes, a little.”

“I hope she didn’t get to you.”

“She didn’t, really,” I said. “People have said worse things about me. Certainly about my mother.”

He hummed discontentedly. “I’m afraid that it’s rather our fault,” he said. “She’s only going after you because you’re with us. Our families have a lot of bad blood, and she takes any chance she gets to shed some more. You’re a large target, for obvious reasons.” His eyes were wide and earnest in apology.

I was too busy thrilling at his casual choice of phrase —  _you’re with us —_ to be much affected by his confession. “That’s all right. It’s not your fault.”

“Listen,” he said, “do you want me to sort it out? I could talk to her, or to Jaime. I don’t have much sway, but I can try to bring them to heel, a little.” 

“No, it’s really all right. I mean, I can handle her. Them. That kind of thing, it doesn’t bother me so much, anymore.”

“No?”

“Not always,” I confessed, emboldened by the wine. I gestured behind us, indicating Arya and Sansa and Bran under the Weirwood. “When I’m with you, I forget I’m a bastard at all.”

Robb stared hard at me for a moment. He took my by the shoulder.

“You’re worth ten of Cersei Lannister,” he said. “Just — remember that, won’t you? Never forget.”

What could I have said? I choked, and he pulled me into a brief and viselike embrace. I clenched the back of his jacket with childlike tightness. Then we detached ourselves, coughed, mumbled our excuses, and went back out to join the others on the lawn. 

It was cold on the grass, but the ever sensible Sansa had brought a blanket, and when we bundled up together on it the heat from our bodies kept us quite cozy. We talked and stargazed until about two in the morning, when it started to rain. At that point we went inside, and I don’t remember where we laid at last to rest — only that I fell asleep with my head pillowed on someone’s leg, and a hand draped carelessly across my chest, and someone snoring distinctly into my ear.

That is the full account of my first visit to Winterfell. I had no knowledge then, nor could I have, that one day the mere sight of it would bring tears to my eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

_Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes._

—Plato, _Republic, Book II_

* * *

As December rounded the corner, I threw myself into a desperate, last-minute play to salvage my grades. Months of distraction and leisure had not helped me. I spent hours at the library, poring over texts that I ought to have had absorbed by mid-October, and tediously copying out declensions until my right hand was cramped in a permanent claw. I roped Bran into it whenever I could, and he sportingly accompanied me to more than his fair share of study sessions. But after a certain number of hours invested in my education, he reminded me firmly that he had his own work to do, and set me free with a firm slap on the back and a wish of good luck.

I was therefore alone on one day in late November when I emerged from the library with little blank print spinning before my eyes. It was a gray afternoon. Sheets of rain coursed against the pavement like the violent enactments of a personal vendetta held by the sky against the ground. Puddles sprouted in deceptively deep troughs on the ground. A bitter chill nipped at my nose. I put up my umbrella and hurried forth into the downpour, turning up the collar on my overcoat.

There was only one other umbrella in the courtyard, which was hunched so low over the heads of its occupants that at first I did not realize there were two of them. They were sitting on a bench, half-concealed under the library eaves, with their knees so close together it seemed they were almost on top of each other. The man — for it seemed to be one, by the style of his handsome green overcoat — was holding the umbrella and had his arm around a woman’s shoulders. She was hunched over her stomach, her head bowed and hair hidden by her black beret, and her shoulders quaked with the unmistakeable rhythm of tears.

I could not help it. I walked over to them, compelled by the worry that she might be hurt, or that they were lost and in need of assistance. If I had been any more acute a social reasoner I might have let them be, and minded my own business, but it has been a cause of trouble for me that I tend to feel stranger’s troubles as my own.

Just as I opened my mouth to call out, the woman heard my footsteps, and looked up. I faltered, and stumbled to a halt, my tongue tripping over an offer of help; it was Cersei.

We had an identical and seemingly automated reaction to each other. She sat up, blinking hard and quickly, and scrubbed her face with the back of one glove, removing any evidence of distress from her personage. I straightened my back and squared my shoulders, as if bracing myself for a hit. Meanwhile, the umbrella tipped back, and the man peered out from underneath it, revealing himself to be none other than Jaime. When he saw me his arm slid casually from his sister’s shoulder. 

“Good afternoon, Snow,” he said cavalierly. Did I imagine the quiver in his baritone, the slight, nigh impalpable break in his cadence? Or the way that his eyes flashed around the courtyard, as if he had only just noticed where he was? I must have, for he carried on with indifference to me and everything else. “Is there something you need?”

“Er, no,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t realize it was you.”

“I’m told I have one of those faces,” he said dryly.

“I suppose.” Jaime waited, making no move to continue the conversation. The best thing would have been to make my exit, but my curiosity getting the better of me, I delicately asked, “Are you waiting for someone?”

“No,” he said simply.

“Lost a key?”

“No.”

“Right,” I said. “I just mean — it’s raining.”

“Oh, is it,” he said, and I heard an echo of Cersei’s acerbic bite, but it was sweetened by an undercurrent of carelessness that lessened the sting. You didn’t believe that Jaime actually cared enough to deliberately insult you, or that he had any real investment in hurting you. He was exclusively interested in his own amusement. It was still unkind, but it wasn’t cruel.

Cersei was uncharacteristically silent. I badly wanted to know why, but knew that asking would earn me nothing more than a caustic remark and a rotten mood. 

“Well, thank you for the weather report, Snow,” Jaime drawled. “If that’s all—”

“Do you need help?”

It rather jumped out of me without permission. It took all three of us entirely by surprise. Jaime glanced at Cersei, who had drawn back as though I had made to strike her across the face.

“No,” he said, after a moment. “Thank you, but we’re entirely all right.”

“Are you?”

He and I stared at each other. Cersei glowered at me from beneath the rim of the umbrella, her eyes red-rimmed and hateful.

“There are a lot of people in Oxford, Jon,” he said lightly. “I’m sure there’s someone out there just dying for you to jump in and play the hero. They languish in breathless anticipation.” His tone was expensive velvet. “But we’d just prefer you fuck off, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Fine,” I snapped, stung. “Sorry I asked.”

I turned to leave, but after taking only a few angry steps in the opposite direction, I was arrested again by the memory of Cersei’s trembling shoulders. I grit my teeth and whirled around.

“Listen,” I said, and they both looked up, startled. “I don’t care what’s going on with you two, and I don’t intend to ask. You seem pretty set on keeping your business to yourself, and that’s fine. But if you don’t want people to go poking into it, you might want to be more discreet.”

The owlish, aghast expressions that this painted on both of their faces were confusing to me at the time. I remember wondering what I had said that so appalled them, and probably would have asked, but by that point I had no patience left for either twin and I stormed off in a rather foul temper.

When I told Robb about it, he leaned back in his armchair and rubbed his jaw, frowning.

“They’re hard people to read,” he said finally. “Nobody really understands them except each other. I’d say I’ll look into it, but I doubt anyone could tell me unless it came from the horse’s mouth.”

“Do you think they’re all right?”

“Oh, I expect so,” he said unconvincingly. “It’ll probably sort itself out. They’re stubborn and richer than royalty, besides. I don’t know of anything that could give them much trouble for long.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with their brother,” I suggested. “Sansa said he was a bit of a problem for the family.”

Robb shook his head. “Tyrion’s a peaceful sort,” he said, surprising me. “An acquired taste, to be fair, but he’s not that kind of problem. He wouldn’t make trouble with anybody. Takes pains to avoid it, in fact.”

“Are we sure he’s a Lannister?”

“Ha! Yes, to his father’s eternal sorrow and grievance, I’m sure. No, I bet it’s not Tyrion, whatever it is.” He frowned again, drumming his fingers on the armrest. Suddenly he sat up and clapped me on the arm. “Best not to worry about it, eh?” He strolled off and into the kitchen.

“Robb,” I began, following him. “You said that their was bad blood between your family and the Lannister’s.”

“Our family, Jon.”

“All right, yes, our family. But you do remember?”

“I suppose I remember mentioning it.”

I leaned against the wall while he poured himself a scotch. “Why is that?”

He glanced up. “Why is what?”

“Don’t be obtuse. Why don’t the Lannisters like us?”

He grimaced, and set the bottle aside. “It’s a long story.”

“You know, with all the time that people have spent telling me it’s a long story, I bet they could have told it.”

A wry expression touched Robb’s face. “Ach. Maybe so. But it’s a long story and an unpleasant story, and I’ve had a rough day. Ask me again some other time.”

“Robb,” I complained.

“Honestly, Jon. I’m not in the right temper for it.” He swigged his scotch, and true to his words, he did appear tired. “Some other time. You have my word.”

That meant something, but I was still dissatisfied with being deferred yet again. Robb downed the rest of the scotch in one go and went back into the living room. I heard his footsteps retreat down the hall. “I’ve got some business in town this evening,” he called. “If she gets back before me, tell Sansa I’m out on an errand.” Then the front door swung open and shut, and then he was gone.

***

The one bright spot in my otherwise dreary end of Michaelmas was my blossoming friendship with Daenerys. She had, I think, accepted with admirable grace the fact that our tutoring sessions were never going to do much good, and we transitioned from our weekly sessions at the library to a series of jaunts around Oxford and the surrounding countryside. She owned a car, a cream-colored roadster with plush leather seats and an engine that sang ever so sweetly when she opened the throttle on empty stretches of road. Daenerys, like Robb, liked to drive fast, but she gave such an impression of competence and self-assurance that one never questioned at all whether they were safe in her car. 

Her pastimes of choice were a bit eccentric and uniformly wealthy. She was partial to shooting, hunting, and hawking — she had three falcons at home whom she confessed to spoiling terribly, a fact which had made me wonder whether all rich folk didn’t make a point of keeping bizarre pets — but the climate in November tended to be unsuitable for those activities, and I was none too good at them besides. Our outings tended to be more peaceful, such as visits to nearby museums and libraries, taking tea at nice clubs, and the occasional visit to her family lake.

On one such excursion, the weather betrayed us by souring from a clear sky at breakfast to a steady downpour by noon. Our plans for a picnic in the countryside were dashed, and I unenthusiastically suggested that we turn back and reschedule, but she drove on with a steady hand and clear eyes.

“Have you got an umbrella?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you English?”

“Yes.”

“Then I fail to see why a little rain should stop us,” she said, and pressed the accelerator.

The lake was a wide, glassy green pool surrounded by furred ridges of lilies and ferns. A few bright lily pads dotted the water. We dragged out a small cedar wood boat out of the shed (“ _Lift_ , Jon,” “I’m lifting! I’m lifting — oh,  _fuck_ —”) and managed to set it afloat by the dock, a process made exponentially harder by the rain. By the time we were watching it bob innocently in the current beneath us, we were both breathing fast, and a bit tired of the whole ordeal. But we agreed we had come too far to turn back.

I rowed us to the center of the lake, which turned out to be an exercise of several muscles that I had forgotten having after leaving Castle Black and now woefully regretted neglecting. Daenerys held the umbrella over both of us, and kept steady the picnic basket in the bottom of the boat. When we reached a point sufficiently distant from shore to satisfy her, I pulled in the oars and we unpacked our lunch: a feast of cold salmon and cream cheese sandwiches, orange slices, and Irish coffees in thermoses. 

We lunched, floating peacefully in the center of the lake. Despite the conditions, I came to appreciate the absolute stillness of it — how between the enclave of the trees and our distance from the shore, insulated by the rain from any noises but the ones we made, it seemed we were the only people on earth. It was a beautiful spot. 

Daenerys gave a small sigh of contentment. I snuck a look at her, and she was more at ease than I had ever seen her. One hand wrapped around the umbrella handle, and with the other she reached out to catch a few raindrops, smiling with childlike joy at the sensation. Her clothes had dried out from our exercise on the dock, but her hair was still dark at the roots from wet, and ran in loose bolts of silver down her shoulders. I swallowed.

Much of my life has been a smear of unmemorable events. They have bled into each other over the years, forming an ill-defined watercolor portrait of cold, hunger, violence, marching, and the endless crackle of gunfire. But some moments — especially that one, with the water streaming from the edges of our umbrella, the boat rocking gently underneath us, her hair so gently misted with dew — remain, despite the years, as clear to me as if I sit there now. How could I forget? Ask me for the color of her cardigan, or the pattern of cattails along the bank, or the direction of the boat’s grain. Ask me the color of her eyes in that light, so dark and fine, and the raindrops beaded on the tips of her eyelashes. I can tell you all.

She turned her head slightly, having noticed my stare. I scrambled for something to say.

“You’re still drenched,” she said with a smile.

“I feel dry.”

“But your hair’s still too straight,” she said. “When it’s dry, it’s much curlier.”

For some reason this minor detail disarmed me. My face warmed, and I studied the grain of the boat seat.

“Are you blushing?” She gave a delighted laugh. “I didn’t realize you were so easy to tease. I would have started much sooner.”

“I’m not blushing.” I was. I added, somewhat vindictively, “Your hair’s darker when it’s wet, you know.”

She paused, her hand drifting up as if to touch it. “Light hair does that,” she said, after a moment. She sounded a bit disarmed, too.

“Yes, I noticed.”

“It’s got to do with the hairs compressing.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“The light can’t get through as well. So it looks darker. But the color’s the same, of course.”

“Is it natural?”

“Sorry?”

“The color.”

“Oh. Yes. It’s genetic. My whole family has it.”

“It must be rare. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Yes. As far as I’m aware, you can only achieve the effect with a few hundred years of interbreeding between Scandinavians.”

Daenerys’ kind of humor was not immediately recognizable to anyone not familiar with her, since it tended to be dry as gin and gave little to work with in the way of tone indicators. I enjoyed it, though. Noticing it gave me the superior feeling of having decoded a secret language, one visible only to the dedicated scholars of Daenerys Targaryen. I laughed, and she gave a pleased chuckle. The boat bucked slowly from side to side, lulling us.

Belatedly I realized we had been doing nothing but looking at each other, and hurried to move past it. 

“Say,” I said, as something occurred to me. “Daenerys — you wouldn’t mind explaining something to me, would you?”

She blinked. “That depends very much on what it is,” she said, a measure of teasing stirred in with a measure of truth.

“It’s nothing personal. More of a factual question, really.”

“I’d still like to hear it before making any promises.”

“It’s about the Lannisters, and the Starks. I don’t know why they’re so at each other’s throats.”

Daenerys cocked her head. “I would think you’d have already heard that story, given the company you keep.”

“You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you? But none of them will tell me. I think they don’t like talking about it, to tell the truth. And it’s not like I can get it from the Lannisters.”

She hummed. Her brow pinched in the particular furrow of concentration that appeared whenever she was paging through her mental lexicon for precisely the right word. I found it absurdly endearing. “It’s… well.”

“If you say ‘it’s a long story,’ I will scream. Just so you know.”

She laughed. “It  _is_ that. But that’s not what I was going to say. I meant to say it’s an  _old_ story, and mostly politics.” She paused. “Which isn’t to say it isn’t personal. For most of the old houses, their personal lives are the political fabric of the nation.”

I tried not to shudder at the thought. She sipped her drink. “How familiar are you with Tywin Lannister?”

“I know who the Prime Minister is, thanks.”

“No, I mean how familiar are you with him? Personally, what do you know about him?”

“That he’s been in his seat for a long time,” I said. “That the Starks don’t like him. That his kids are right shits.”

Her cheeks pinked, and she stifled a laugh into her hand. “That’s not helpful, Jon.”

“S’true, though.”

“You’re a biased source. Anyway, before he was in power, his family was allied with the Starks in a coalition behind a man named Robert Baratheon, who history suggests would have been a sure thing for the next Lord Speaker.” She blew on her thermos and sipped again.

“Would have been?”

“Lord Baratheon’s career was cut quite short,” she said, with something less than genuine remorse. “Tragically so. You see, he was a great friend of Ned Stark’s, so their alliance was forged in fraternity. But Tywin wouldn’t be so easily bought with brotherhood. Robert was engaged to Tywin’s daughter. I believe you know her.”

My mind at first refused to wrap itself around the idea she was presenting, and for a moment struggled to find a different plausible interpretation, like a dog trying to find a way around a fence. The horror set in not long after.

“No, not—”

“The very same,” she said.

“But she would’ve been only a baby, then! If that!”

“Your outrage is heartwarming,” she said. “But never fear. Poor Cersei was not to be so lovelessly wed.”

The way she said  _Poor Cersei_ was enough to make me wonder if she hadn’t something against the Lannisters, too.

“Robert Baratheon broke his oaths, you see,” she said, casting her eyes to the shoreline. There was something mischievous in her tone. “His heart belonged to another woman, so he called off the engagement in order to marry her. It was a terrible move, but there was never much evidence that Robert Baratheon was a keen political thinker.” She shrugged. “And they do say that Lyanna Stark was quite beautiful.”

I froze.

“We have a saying, in my family, about love and duty. I suppose Robert never heard it. —Lannister was furious, obviously. Broke the allegiance on the spot, withdrew funding for all of Robert’s campaigns, smeared him in the press, the full nine. The newspapers were in ecstasies. ‘War Hero Breaks Engagement, Ruins Prospects for Love.’ Everyone was very disappointed when she didn’t love him back.” 

Her expression made it clear that she regarded this as only slightly unfortunate and mostly amusing. “I suppose it is a tragedy. He made a powerful enemy and permanently ended his political career, all for the sake of a woman who didn’t want him. But I always struggled to feel sympathy for him.” She smiled, a bit meanly. “I mean, one does wonder why he never thought of asking Lyanna what she wanted first.”

One did, and I had. The notion of Lyanna as a real person, with friends and enemies and unrequited lovers, had sent me reeling; I had lived so long with only the shadowy ghost of her in my imagination that the idea of her in flesh and blood was almost incomprehensible. I decided to put that tangle of thorns aside for later, when I was alone.

“You said they were in a coalition,” I said slowly. “Against what? Who were they trying to unseat?”

“My father,” she said.

_“What?”_

She adjusted one cufflink, utterly serene. “Aerys Targaryen. They called him the Mad King, if that gives you any idea of how widely loathed he was. Eventually, Tywin Lannister did manage to unseat him, albeit only a few years after the alliance collapsed. Bit of a coup, when it happened. Then Aerys died and so did my mother, and Lord Lannister fearlessly led our country into a new epoch of prosperity.”

Bitterness dripped from her tongue.

“I’m sorry,” I said. She shrugged.

In a spur of bravery, I reached out and took her hand. She allowed me to hold it, averting her eyes.

“Do you miss him?”

“He was a terrible politician,” she said tonelessly.

“But he was your father.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

I held her hand for a while. After a few minutes, she quietly turned her palm upward and laced her fingers with mine. We bobbed on the lake for some time without any sense of direction — we two orphans, adrift together.

***

Of those very last days before vacation, I remember little. It was a haze of sleep, study, and more sleep, populated occasionally by breaks for wine or coffee. At some point I must have actually sat down and taken the exams, but for the life of me I can’t remember any of them. I simply emerged on the other side of the experience blinking and marveling at my sudden abundance of freedom like someone blundering out of Plato’s cave.

Sansa celebrated by taking Bran and I shopping for a winter wardrobe. Her selection of companions for this venture was determined not by personal preference but by the poor haste with which we had offered excuses; when she presented the idea at the dinner table, Robb and Arya both immediately declared with deep regret that they had fencing practice and could not come.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, you know,” Bran said glumly to me, as we followed her down a veritable firing squad of glossy storefronts. “If she could just do it efficiently. That’s the way shopping with Father is. You go in, you get the thing, you go. It’s a simple exchange of money for goods and/or services. But she has to see everything in the store, twice, before she’ll even think of buying an item.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

He arched one eyebrow and turned to his sister, raising his voice. “Sansa,” he said, “how long did you spend at Bloomingdale’s, the last time we went to London?”

Her voice floated over her shoulder from where she strode ahead of us. “You’re not still mad about that,” she said distractedly, absorbed as she was in a winter coat display.

“Just the number, Sansa, dearest. If you would.”

“Oh, I don’t remember. Something on the longer side, I suppose.”

“I think you do remember.”

She sighed, and her cheek twitched a little, which was as close as Sansa ever came to rolling her eyes. “Five hours isn’t even that long.”

“Five!”

“Oh, don’t you start, too, Jon.”

“Really,” I said incredulously. “Five hours?”

“It’s a big store,” she said loftily, “and I was buying New Years’ presents.” 

Bran and I exchanged a look that was probably similar to the one shared by cellmates on death row, and did not comment.

“In fact I am still mad about it,” Bran confided in me under his breath, once she had been properly distracted by the price tags on a set of peacock feather coats. “Five hours, and I was stuck carrying her bags like some kind of secretary. Hell is the inside of a Bloomingdale’s, I’m telling you. And as soon as I complained — ‘Oh, Bran, what do you have to worry about? You’re not even on your feet!’ Oh yes, Sansa, thank you, that’s exactly what the problem is. Obviously I must be complaining of the terrible  _pain in my legs_ .”

He shoved himself forward with a particular vengeance. I trotted to keep up with him. “Anyway,” he said, “you and me, we’re going to sneak away first chance we get and go to a pub. She probably won’t notice we’re gone until an hour’s passed, but by then I intend to be completely drunk, so it won’t matter. You shall have to wheel me out in a stupor.”

This seemed an excellent plan to me. We stopped at a little corner store with steps leading up to the entrance, and instead of attempting the three-person job of lifting Bran’s chair, he and I opted to wait outside while she went in.

We were chatting idly and watching people bustle past when I picked a familiar face out of the crowd. It was Cersei, her wide cloche hat tipped so low I nearly missed her, ducking out of a small windowless shop in the alley opposite us. She wore a shapeless fur coat with a large ruff that rose up to her cheeks and carried no shopping bags, only a small leather pocketbook. Without her distinctive hair or sense of style, one could scarcely recognize her without chancing a good look at her face, which between the coat and the hat were hard to come by. Jaime was nowhere to be found.

I waited for her to notice me, but she kept her face down and head low. I only caught sight of her for a moment because she had stopped in the alley to check her pocketbook. Then she stepped into the crowd and was gone.

“That’s an odd coincidence,” I said.

“What?” said Bran.

“Seeing her here.”

“Who?”

“Cersei.”

He made a show of shuddering. “Good gods, is she lurking around?”

“You mean you didn’t see her?” I pointed across the street. “She was just there.”

Bran at least paid me the compliment of checking the area where I pointed, but he was already shaking his head. “I didn’t see anybody,” he said. “Are you sure it was her?”

“Pretty sure. Blonde hair, green eyes…” 

“Looks like she drowns puppies for sport?”

“You know, I couldn’t say at this distance.”

“Could have been anyone, then,” he said reasonably. “Come on, let’s go find that pub. We should distract you from your horrifying visions.”

We wandered off. I relented and admitted to Bran, after a while, that it might not have been Cersei I saw, and that I might have been wrong. After all, she was not the only blonde woman in the world, and I had only glimpsed her in motion from across a crowded street, and because it seemed unimportant at the time I let it pass. I had no desire to feel curious about Cersei’s life. At a certain point it felt better to believe that I had imagined it, and for a while, that is exactly what I did.


	6. Chapter 6

_“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person ‘the world today’ or ‘life’ or ‘reality’ he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.”_

—John Knowles, _A Separate Peace_

* * *

From the moment I first set foot in Oxford I had dreaded the end of term, when I would have to retreat for a month from its cheery stone buildings and lush greens, and return to the land of mortals. As the term wound to its close, the snow thickened from carpets to coverlets to cascades, and the sun spent shorter and shorter shifts in the sky, and I felt an encroaching sense of despair. On December seventh I woke up half hoping that by some happy trick of time, the calendar had stalled a while on my behalf, and it would be December sixth again when I went to look, but there was no such luck.

In previous years I had spent the winter vacation at Castle Black, where I and some other boys scrubbed floors and fortified walls in order to earn our keep. But now that I was graduated, I had to arrange my own accommodations until January, a prospect which was all the more daunting for my having put it off.

Renly was taking Margaery and Loras to Italy for the vacation, a fact which Loras announced at the beginning of December and continued to stress for the next week. It was to be quite a luxurious trip. They had booked a palace in the heart of Rome, and intended to spend their days drinking and spending as much of Renly’s hard-inherited money as time and human limits would allow. Loras had begun to prepare for it by peppering bits of Italian into his casual lingo. Either he was aware of my inauspicious circumstances and meant to rub them in my face, or he was trying very obliquely to invite me along, and I had not an eighth of the social insight necessary to know which.

“Parli Italiano, Jon?” he inquired, in an accent that was more Paris than Rome.

“Afraid not,” I said, turning a page in my book.

He held up an emerald silk bathrobe, examined it critically, and then tossed it in his suitcase. “Shame. It’s a beautiful language. And Rome, I don’t need to tell you. Especially for someone studying Latin. It’d be a dream.”

“I’m sure it would be.”

“Now, don’t be sore. I tried to beg off the trip, you know. I said, ‘This is for you and Margaery, and I’d absolutely be a third wheel.’ But they wouldn’t allow me! Renly just wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. And you know how Margaery is.”

I had only ever met her the once, a fact of which he was fully aware, but to his credit, that had indeed been enough for me to know how Margaery was.

“I can imagine,” I said.

“They are such generous people. The house is so big, too. A whole palazzo! Much too big for just little old us.”

I turned another page in my book.

“If you’re ever in Rome over the vacation, you must come visit us,” he said, flinging another silk shirt into his bag. “Just give us a call if you’re in the area. We’d be glad to have you over.”

I tend to think that Loras knew perfectly well I would not be floating aimlessly around Europe during my vacation, but I still cannot decide whether the remark was meant as an insult or a sincere offer, disguised in the only terms his pride would allow.

The Starks were going home, of course. It was all they could talk about. It seemed that as the vacation neared, they vibrated with eager energy at the prospect, discussing at length what fine adventures they planned to get up to in the Edenic gardens of Winterfell. I doubt they realized how, with each rambling game of “Over the break, I shall…” I became more withdrawn, less prone to interject, and generally inclined to remain silent until the subject was changed or the conversation dispersed. They surely noticed my sudden coldness whenever discussions of Winterfell arose, but with typical prudence, they refrained from commenting on it. I think they believed that finals had simply put me in a bad mood.

Daenerys would be spending the break in Boston. Since October she had been planning to visit a dear friend of hers who was studying languages at Radcliffe, and it was far too late for her to arrange for me to come along. Nevertheless, she generously offered to let me stay at her family estate while she was gone.

“The servants will be there,” she assured me, as if that was anything remotely like my concern. “So you’ll be taken care of. And Viserys doesn’t expect to be home from Montecarlo until February, so there’s little danger of you seeing each other.”

I had no doubt that a vacation spent at Dragonstone Estate would be nothing less than luxurious, with or without her company, and I was sorely tempted by the offer. But money posed another problem. In order to finance another term of studies, I needed a job, and there was little in the way of employment opportunities in the middle of the English countryside. So I declined the chance to stay at Dragonstone, claiming that I had already made arrangements elsewhere. Needless to say, I had not.

The money was the real thing. For young and low-birthed men without a degree, the available employment opportunities did not seem prosperous. Some of the people I knew were staying on at Oxford as research assistants and aides. I doubted any of my professors would be volleying to bring me onto their staffs. I made some halfhearted inquiries with various teachers anyway, but the salaries available to research assistants left much to be desired in the way of making rent.

By chance, it was old Colonel Aemon who saved me from homelessness. When I wrote to him of my troubles, he replied with the address of an old military colleague. The man, a retired lieutenant of considerable age, rented out his upstairs apartment in London. For room and board, I would be asked to sweep, light fires, and do other sorts of light menial work, while most of my day was left free to study or pursue whatever occupations pleased me.

When my cousins heard of what I would be doing over the vacation, they were deeply supportive of my industriousness. Bran commended my work ethic. Arya ordered me to discover as many of the London clubs as possible and report back to her posthaste on which ones were any good. Robb, perhaps glimpsing the real motivation for my choice of housing, offered to help cover rent somewhere else if I wished, but I was too proud to accept it, and anyway I felt it best to conceal as much as possible about the nature of my finances.

On the day of departure, I saw the Starks off. Robb had brought the car up in front of their building, and they were preparing for a long drive through the snow to Winterfell. I helped pack up their trunks, squeezing a bit to fit four in the car’s moderately sized boot, and then leant Bran a hand on his way into the back seat. It was midmorning, and already snow had started to trickle in fine silver grains from the sky. 

Arya was the first to say goodbye. She sprang up and gave me a rough hug. “Write, or else,” she threatened. “I’ll be very put out if you forget me.”

“Not much chance of that.”

“I should hope so.” She tussled my hair quickly before letting me go. “See in you in January, eh?”

“Farewell, Arya.”

She saluted and hopped up into the car, vaulting the door rather than bothering to open it. 

Sansa was next. She took my hands and kissed me on both cheeks. “Be good in London,” she said. “Stay out of trouble, and keep warm.”

“I will.”

“And  _do_ write to us. Arya will miss you terribly, even if she won’t say it.”

“Of course I will.”

I gave her a peck on the cheek and helped her into the car. Then Robb and I wrestled the roof up, pulling it forward so that it covered the driver as well as the back row. It was a process not helped by increasingly poor visibility and slippery terrain. When we were done we both leaned against the engine and caught our breath.

“Well, this is it, Snow,” he said.

“So it seems, Stark.”

We shook hands. “Enjoy London,” he said. “It’s a wonderful city. We’ll be thinking of you.”

“And I you,” I said honestly.

“Do take care of yourself. And if you need anything—”

“Of course.”

“I mean, really. Just send a note.”

“Thank you.”

He smiled and climbed into the car. Leaning out of the window, he said, “See you in the new year, Jon.”

“Until then,” I said hollowly, and the window rolled up. They motored off in the Rolls-Royce, the wheels paving twin tracks in the snow. I watched until the beads of their tail lights were no longer visible through the swirling fog, and then walked alone back to my dorm.

Loras had departed a day early for Rome, so the room was empty when I arrived. I packed my things in the newfound and eerie silence, and walked to the train station in the whirling snow. My train departed as the last scrap of light faded from the western sky.

The address given to me lead to a dilapidated Victorian house near Canary Wharf. Bulging gables jutted from the ancient, blackened wood, deep eaves threw shade over the windows, and one part of the roof had collapsed, leaving a sunken abscess in the gray shingles. Cracks and moss sprouted from the stone path to the entrance. The air smelled of smoke and exhaust from the nearby industrial center, and on the porch sat a mangy-furred cat with yellow eyes.

Lieutenant Frey greeted me with a bitter exclamation of disappointment at my lateness — I was not late — and directed me to my room, which was in one of the old gables at the top of the house and up three flights of stairs. The lieutenant was equally disheartening to look at as his house. He was an old, snag-toothed man without a single hair to speak of, and the colorless skin of his face hung loose in a vulture’s wattle beneath his neck. Age spots peppered the bare expanse of his head. His eyes were bleached pale, and without his glasses they were incapable of spotting anything more than three inches in front of them. He had a habit of hunching when he walked, which combined with his pointy shoulders and otherwise unpleasant manner made him resemble a large featherless vulture. 

He did not offer to help me with my trunk.

“You’ll start with the attic tomorrow morning,” he called, hobbling up the stairs ahead of me. “There’s boxes of rubbish to be cleaned out, and the whole floor needs dusting. Then you can do the basement. I think there’s something wrong with the boiler. You ought to take a look at it.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Feh. You’re from Castle Black, aren’t you, boy?”

“I studied there, yes.”

“Miserable school,” he said with relish. “They take all kinds. No discretion! Eastwatch, now there’s an institution of quality. All the good officers came from Eastwatch. Nothing out of Castle Black but wastrels and cowards.”

I considered politely inquiring which decade this information was sourced from, but thought better of it.

“Very good, sir,” I said politely.

“What? You won’t say a word in its defense?”

“You should know better than me, sir.”

“Damn well I should,” he said irritably. “I was the captain of a company when you were a twinkle in your father’s eye. And I was a soldier before  _he_ was a twinkle in  _his_ father’s. The young think they’re so high and mighty. Them, the infants! Mere children only! You think you’re lord and master of the whole bloody world, don’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“Good! You aren’t!” He seemed furious that I had agreed with him. We arrived at last on the top floor, and he jerked his thumb gracelessly at one of the doors. “There’s your room. I suppose you’ll want to complain of it.”

In truth, I did want to complain of it. It was a small and threadbare joint with only a wire frame bed shoved in the corner, a dresser, and a thin, grimy window with what appeared to be a broken latch. The low roof was braced on exposed rafters, and the floors were poorly sanded, as though whoever had built the house couldn’t be bothered to finish this part of it. Already I could tell that the place had a draft; I shivered as I stepped inside the door.

But I didn’t want to aggravate my landlord so soon in my visit, so I thanked him duly and set about unpacking my things. Lieutenant Frey lingered for a while in the hallway, making snide remarks about my education and the general character of youth, until he tired of it and wandered away. 

Alone at last, I surrendered to the tide of misery that had been looming ever since I first saw the house.

I speak to you now as a man of almost twenty years’ military experience, hardened in battle, trained from a young age to endure the most inhospitable conditions it is possible for the human body to survive: the three weeks I spent in that room were the worst of my life. No amount of endurance training could have prepared me for twenty-one days in an unheated building in London during the coldest part of the year. I slept in three layers of clothes and mummified myself in the raggedy wool blanket provided. I wore my overcoat and gloves indoors. I spent as much time as possible in the basement, where the boiler was, in order to fend off frostbite. Making the whole ordeal worse was the fact that Lieutenant Frey found my discomfort highly amusing, and took to teasing me for my “sensitivity” to the cold; I only found out later, of course, that his own quarters were warmed year-round, and he shut off the heating in his rented apartments to save money during the winter.

During the day, I did whatever chores needed doing around the house. I swept floors, cleaned out boxes in the attic, and made an honest attempt at fixing the boiler. My favorite task was cleaning out the oven, which was sometimes still warm from the maid’s last preparation of a meal, and I burned myself several times trying to warm my naked fingers while scrubbing it. With what little free time I had, I made a few dispirited attempts to read, but my shivering distracted me and my numb fingers made it hard to turn the pages.

Throughout all this, my one solace was my letters. I still have some of them, although they have aged from years of being carried in my breast pocket. Daenerys, bless her, wrote me as often as possible, although because her missives had to travel across the Atlantic to reach me, they were delayed in arrival and limited in number. Out of shame or a stupid sense of forbearance, I did not tell her (nor anyone else) about my living conditions.

At night, when I had some time at last free from chores and the relentless surveillance of Lieutenant Frey, I would write back. I had only a short time to write before my fingers cramped from cold and it became impossible to hold a pen, so I usually jotted out hasty replies to whomever I had heard from recently.

The lieutenant was surprised by my rigorous promptness in getting the post every morning.

“Waiting for something,” he croaked, “eh, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An allowance coming from your parents?” He was enjoying himself.

“No, sir. Letters from my friends.”

“Letters? Contemptible. In my day, if you had something to say, you walked up to a man’s face and said it yourself.”

After three weeks, a letter arrived for me that was quite different from Daenerys’ neatly addressed envelopes. For one thing, it was absolutely covered in stamps. About two dozen of the things had been pasted hurriedly all over the envelope in no particular order, giving it the appearance of an art collage. For another, it was sealed with a wax crest that I did not recognize, composed of a sword and a raven feather, crossed.

Puzzled, I flipped it over, saw the handwriting on the address, and tore it open on the spot.

> _Arya Stark_   
>  _Winterfell Castle_   
>  _The North???_   
>  _probably december_
> 
> _Dear_ _Jon,_
> 
> _Never mind the paper this is on I had to write at Once_ (sic) _and could not be bothered to find stationery. Also do not mind the crest on the envelope I had to seal the thing somehow (see above: at Once) as Father does not allow use of the family crest for personal letters and Bran was the only one willing to let me use his._
> 
> _Jon you have disappointed me utterly. You have not visited a single club all the time you have been in London & worse still you have been writing only sometimes when I specifically instructed you to write often. These kinds of betrayals have wounded me most soundly and I have lost all faith in our brotherhood and in you. _
> 
> _You have only one chance to restore it. Come to Winterfell at_ _Once_ (this was underlined twice) _and stay with us until Hilary or I forever renounce you and your company._
> 
> _Hope this is enough stamps._
> 
> _Love or what you will._
> 
> _A.S._

Enclosed was enough money for a train ticket and a hastily drawn caricature of me with an exaggerated frown, helpfully captioned ‘YOU.’

The next day, I was shouting a distracted goodbye to the lieutenant over my shoulder as I hauled my trunk down the front drive. He scarcely had time to scold me for my failure to notify him of my departure before I was flagging a taxi and zipping off to the train station, where I counted out pound notes at the ticket teller with the care of someone handling flakes of pure gold.

It was a long train to the North. I left in the morning, and it was late afternoon by the time I stepped onto the platform at Torrhen’s Square. It was a small and ramshackle station that was the closest anyone could get to Winterfell without driving, and I was the only one who got off at the stop.

Robb met me at the entrance. He wore a full fur-lined cloak over his suit and heavy leather driving gloves. When he saw me he whisked off his cap and broke into a beam, taking four quick strides forward to wrap me in a quick embrace.

“You made it,” he said. “Excellent. Arya will be bloody pleased.”

“Robb. It’s damn good to see you.” I had never meant anything more in my life. I was bizarrely relieved to see him; it reassured me that the Starks were real, and not — as I had sometimes feared — a set of false happy memories that I had invented to comfort myself in the cold.

“And you, cousin,” he said grandly, and lifted my trunk onto his shoulder, whistling a tune.

Inside his car it was blessedly warm. He had the radiator blasting, and I pressed my fingers greedily against the grate. Robb chatted to me as we drove, telling me all about how fine the grounds looked and how glad he was to have me there.

“You’ll be bunking in the room next to mine,” he said. “Arya complained, but Mother’s insistent that you stay in the boys’ wing. She’s a bit of a traditionalist. Not that it helps. She’s certain to get to you if she wants to, anyway; she knows her way around the vents.”

“The vents?”

He ignored me. “I should warn you ahead of time,” he added, as we glided through the gates, “Mother and Father are here. They’ll want to greet you when we arrive, I expect.”

“Oh.” Of course they would be at Winterfell; it was their home, after all. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. Despite my previous eagerness to meet my aunt and uncle, I balked at the prospect of encountering them in the flesh.

Robb glanced at me. “They’ll be perfectly civil, you know,” he said. “If you’re worried. You’re our guest.”

“But they didn’t invite me.”

“That doesn’t mean they don’t want you here,” he said. “Father told Arya she could invite you.”

This gave me some hope, and as we rounded the corner towards Winterfell I stoked a sense of cautious enthusiasm.

Winter had dressed the castle in bridal fashion. Snow frosted the top of each tree and piled on the ground in thick, billowing drifts that rose in dykes around the roads. Icicles hung from each eave. All the fountains had frozen solid, and frost crusted each window with elaborate patterns of lace. Our breath was sugar white as we stepped out of the car.

Standing in the entrance to the castle were Lord and Lady Stark, stationed next to each other like king and queen on a chessboard. Lord Eddard was a tall, graying man in late middle age, sporting a scruffy beard. His eyes were bracketed by wrinkles, aging him beyond his years, but the set of his jaw and brow reminded me shockingly of Arya. A massive cloak hung from his shoulders, with a wolfskin pelt about the shoulders and leather straps winding across the chest. 

His wife was a projection of Sansa in thirty years’ time. Her red hair, darkened by age, was wound into a braid at her back; she wore a high-necked gown and had a thin face, which she had arranged in a delicate, neutral expression. She held her husband’s arm, but as I approached she separated herself and stepped forward.

“Jon Snow,” she said. “Welcome to Winterfell.”

I hurriedly bobbed in a bow. “Lady Stark,” I said. “Lord Stark. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“It’s a pleasure,” said Lady Stark smoothly. “Robb speaks highly of you. To say nothing of Arya.”

“I’m sure I don’t deserve it.”

“Robb’s praise is hard to earn,” she said simply. Her expression was absolutely unreadable. “His good opinion is rarely fickle.”

“Go easy, Mother,” said Robb jovially, and he leaned down to kiss her cheek. He nodded to Lord Stark. “Father.”

“Son.” Lord Stark had a voice like a rockslide — it was less of a baritone than a low rumble that issued from his chest. 

His gaze fell on me. I straightened. Robb paused, and I could feel the tension winding in his core like a spring being slowly compressed, ready to eject itself wildly at a hair’s provocation. I wanted to put a hand on his arm, to ease him, but I didn’t dare.

“I haven’t seen you since you were a newborn,” said Lord Stark.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say to this, or if I was meant to reply. Robb touched my elbow, perhaps unconsciously, in a little protective gesture.

Just as the ensuing pause verged on awkwardness, my uncle spoke again.

“You look like your mother,” he said.

My mouth fell open. I must have blinked half a dozen times. The remark struck me with astonishing force. Something deep inside me slotted into place, and the rest of me thrummed like a well-ordered machine. I felt as if I had been waiting my whole life to hear a single sentence, always desperately needing it, but never knowing what it was, until the Lord Stark deposited it unceremoniously in my lap.

Lord Stark glanced at Robb. “Quiet one, isn’t he?” he remarked.

“It’s not his fault you’re scaring him,” Robb said genially, but there was a warning laced into it. He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me gently past them. “I’m going to get Jon settled. What time’s dinner?”

“Eight o’clock,” said Lady Stark. “Black tie, to welcome our guest.”

“Splendid. Ta, Mother. Father.”

“Until then, Jon,” called Lord Stark to me, with some amusement, and I hope I managed to stammer something back.

“Bugger,” Robb muttered, once we were out of earshot. “I don’t suppose you packed a dinner jacket, did you? You can borrow one of mine, if not. She likes an excuse to get dressed up, show us off.”

“Was he being honest, your father?” I blurted. 

“Sorry?”

“When he said I looked like my mother. Do you think he was being polite?”

“What? No, I’m sure he meant it.” Robb lead me up a grand, sweeping marble staircase and down an airy hallway lined with bay windows. Snow flushed gently against the glass. “Father doesn’t lie, even to flatter. And you do look like your mother; I’ve seen portraits.”

I startled so hard I dropped my trunk. “There are portraits of her?”

He paused, a bit unnerved by my stare, and bent to pick it up. “Yes, of course. She was a noblewoman.”

“Are they here? In Winterfell?”

“Where else?” He gestured vaguely to the left. “Check the east wing. There’s a whole room of family portraits that date back to the sixteenth century, she’s in the one just before ours.” 

It took considerable restraint not to abandon him on the spot. I asked stiffly, “Could I see her, sometime, do you think?”

He paused. His eyes softened in sorrow, and he gave a small, sad smile. “Of course you can,” he said. “I’ll take you tomorrow.”

I was going to say something else, but we were interrupted by footsteps thundering on the hardwood.

We both took identical sharp breaths to clear the air, and turned in time to see Arya streaking along at full speed down the hallway. “Jon,” she cried.

“Arya!”

I opened my arms, and she hurtled into them, colliding with my chest like a baseball striking the mitt of a catcher’s glove.

I hoisted her up and twirled her, laughing. She wrapped her arms and legs around me with the kind of hold that suggested I might have to pry her off with a crowbar. “I’ve been dying of boredom,” she accused my left shoulder in muffled tones.

“I’m very sorry. It’s my fault, I’m sure.”

“It is! Did you get my letter?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Were there enough stamps?”

“Enough to fund the Royal Mail for a year.”

“Good. I wasn’t sure.”

“I also enjoyed your drawing.” 

“Did you really!” She was delighted.

“I treasure it dearly. I shall frame it and keep it in my room.”

Nymeria came trotting up behind her mistress and respectfully sniffed my leg. Her tail gave two wags of greeting.

“If you’re finished strangulating our guest,” Robb said, (“I’m not,” said Arya), “then I mean to show him where he’s sleeping. You can come along, if you like.”

“Don’t be so  _boring_ . He’s just got here. He can put his bags away later. He’s been gone for ages, let’s have some fun.”

“He should get some rest, after traveling,” Robb said doubtfully, but the spark of her idea had caught in his eye. “I’m sure he’s tired.”

“Are you tired, Jon?”

“No,” I said. In their company, I could never be. God, but I had missed this most of all: this restless thirst for joy and entertainment, the kettle-drum rhythm of their lives. With them the world was bright and exciting, and all manner of fortune and luck seemed to bend to their will.

“Well, then.” She disembarked from my torso with great dignity. “Let’s have a drink and show him the shooting range.”

“Dear sister, I’m not sure those two undertakings go particularly well together.”

“On the contrary,” she said, with a ferocious smile — and how I ached to see that smile, the smile Robb and I would have both taken an arrow to the heart for in an instant, the smile that could have brought nations to their knees. “They go excellently well together.”

That evening I had three martinis before dinner and hit absolutely nothing, but I did pour bullets into the trees surrounding the targets with such zeal that I doubt any squirrels have returned to the area since.

Oh, what can I tell you of those days, those idle, perfect days at Winterfell? Of days short and nights eternal, when the five of us ran wild in the endless gardens of their parents’ castle? That month was the bloom of my young life. The days ran into each other, distinct in events and adventures but uniform in their happiness. We ate richly and drank well. We romped until our limbs ached and slept until noon. The world outside us retreated, and after a week, I had forgotten anything else existed.

One day they got it into their heads to go ice skating, and we hiked through the hills until we reached a frozen pond with ice thick enough for our purposes. Robb and Arya began zipping around at once like flies, carving thick white designs in the grey glass, while Bran sat reading by the dock. I could not skate, nor wanted to. I made every effort to excuse myself. I feigned interest in Bran’s book. In the end, it was Sansa who took my hands and eased herself backward onto the ice, dragging me along on wobbly legs. She kept up a steady stream of reassurances. I kept up a steady pall of dread. We completed a full circuit around the pond in this fashion, her calm and coaxing, I fearful and rigid. It took her the better part of an hour to get me moving. Even then, I would only relent to shuffle along with short and highly controlled nudges of the ankle, while she held my arm and coasted gracefully beside me.

Needless to say, Arya found this highly amusing. She skated backwards beside us for a while, jeering at my vice-like grip on Sansa’s arm. Then she lost her footing and landed hard on her rear, and for some reason grew much more supportive after that.

Another day we went hunting on horseback, with Sansa absent on account of not having the stomach for it. The dogs were excellent for it, and could retrieve almost any game, even buried under four feet of heavy snow. I proved to be a decent marksman when I wasn’t drunk as a fish, and we scored several wild turkeys for a New Year’s dinner. 

I shall always remember that as the day I discovered Bran Stark was a terrible shot. It was an inexplicable element of his character, unrelated to anything else I knew about him, and it had no discernible cause. He did not do anything apparently wrong. It was simply a law of nature that when Bran aimed a gun at something, the bullet went somewhere else.

It was also, incidentally, the day I was narrowly saved from sudden death by Arya having the presence of mind to screech “Duck!” before a shot whistled through the place my head had been shortly before.

In the aftermath, wiping mud and snow from the front of my shirt, I asked Bran whether he had been aiming for anything in particular.

“Sorry, coz,” he said, with the sort of rueful apology typical of someone who has just taken the last slice of cake, and not very nearly murdered a kinsman. “Don’t know what happened. I aimed for the bird, I really did.”

“Are you aware that the bullet goes where you point it? And not, say, ninety degrees leewards?”

“So they tell me,” he laughed, and rode on unbothered.

On still other days we scheduled nothing in particular, but romped aimlessly in the open fields just beyond the hedges, rolling around with the juvenile elation of children discovering their first snow. We raced toboggans down the big hills, two to a sled, me and Arya against Bran and Rickon (who I met that vacation; a scrawny, strong-willed ginger boy with a ravenous sweet tooth, and who rather worshipped me after finding out I was from the army). When we tired of that, we roped Sansa and Robb into a good old-fashioned snowball war, three on three, a brigade of redheads against a battery of dark-haired hooligans. The hooligans won, but the redheads guilted us out of having any satisfaction about it, particularly the one whose dress had been soaked through when someone shoved a piece of ice down the back.

Or shall I tell you of this: on a rare day when I was floating alone and unaware in the castle, trying to find my way to the library, I was assailed by a clamor of shouting and a clash of steel.

Suddenly Robb skidded around the corner, his clothes and hair ruffled and wild. He grasped a sword in his right hand, and his shirt was hanging out of his pants at the side. Sweat gleamed on his temples.

His eyes fell upon me and blazed with furious excitement. “For gods’ sake, Jon,” he cried, “don’t just stand there! Help a man!” And acting quickly, he pried another sword down from the display case on the wall and tossed it to me, a bizarre gesture that shocked me into catching the hilt out of instinct.

“What? Robb—”

He seized me by the shoulder and wheeled me to face her. “Two of us together, we can take her,” he whispered bracingly. “Never fear. Two on one, back to back, we can do it, come on. Don’t fail me now, Jon.”

Arya rounded the corner, her cheeks flushed, her hair similarly ruffled, also clutching a blade. “Coward!” she cried, her sword leveled at his heart like an accusing finger. “Stand and fight!”

I instinctively jumped  _en garde,_ not out of any real desire to fight her, but out of the embedded martial reflex which is invariably triggered by having a deadly weapon pointed at you. Robb took this as a sign of allegiance and roared in approval.

She lunged. I would like to say that we easily overpowered her, but even then, Arya against two men twice her size was an Arya kept barely at bay. Her form made art of violence. Her sword flew in elaborate patterns to catch each of our strikes as they fell, her point diving and arcing with the liquid grace of a ribbon dancer performing Mozart.She caught both of our swords on the flat of hers, flicked them off, parried our strikes in a one-two heartbeat rhythm. Her enemy was formidable: Robb and I moved with deadly synchrony, my sword carving low as his swung down from high, my lunge paired with his retreat, his left feint coupled with my coupé. It did not matter. We could not lay a hit. We were whaling away at a brick wall, and the wall was embarrassing us.

“To the stairs,” Robb told me urgently, and we backpedaled to the staircase a few meters behind us. Arya chased us, dueling us up to the landing and then down the very steps, trading blows from a vantage point three stairs above us while we pressed her up against the railing. Here the uneven turf played to our advantage. Her advances were stymied by the necessity of moving diagonally and in three dimensions. When her back bumped against the bannister for the third time, she let out a grunt of irritation and then — in a move that indefinitely unhinged my jaw — leapt up onto the railing, balanced on the balls of her feet, and resumed dueling us.

It was a great fight, and one that might have gone on indefinitely, had Lady Stark not discovered us sparring on her grand staircase, hauled us all down, and read us three separate but equally incriminating versions of the riot act.

The Lord and Lady Stark were always a mystery to me. I knew them as acquaintances, and fond ones, I think, by the end of my stay. Lady Stark was unfailingly hospitable, although less than warm, and clammed up at the mere mention of my mother. Lord Stark, however, would relent to speak on occasion on the subject of Lyanna.

“She was a fiery thing,” he said at length, once I mustered the courage to ask. “Wild. Stubborn as the seven hells. She liked to ride horses.”

Lord Stark was not a man of great eloquence. When he paused, I feared this was all I would get out of him.

“If you know Arya,” he said, “you knew Lyanna, in her youth.”

That was the most he ever said about her at once. I could not get much more from him, try as I did (and try I did not, at least not often). Grief has a way of weighing on the tongue.

What else shall I tell you? I will tell you this.

In the last days of our vacation, the thaw came. Green poked its fingers through the snow in the yard, and the trees glistened brown and naked in the morning light. Melting icicles ran in continuous streams from the eaves. The sun poured and poured and poured over everything, a warmth so long gone that we had forgot what it felt like.

The five of us decided to take advantage of the weather and go for a picnic. The servants loaded up three baskets’ worth of provisions for us, and armed with these vittles, we waded out into the afternoon. There large oak tree in the garden whose roots emerged from the earth and twined in shapes fitting for chairs, and it was in the shade of this tree’s branches that we spread our blanket. 

Our lunch was a delectable charcuterie spread with figs and grapes, paired with a bottle of red wine and some éclairs for dessert. We ate and made halfhearted plans to play croquet — which never materialized — or some other rigorous activity deserving of the sunshine, but what we really wanted to do was lounge, and so that was what we did. The combination of warmth and full bellies had turned our blood to molasses. I don’t remember doing anything else that day, and yet it remains one of my fondest, sharpest memories of the whole vacation.

It was vivid, I think, because of how well it captured us. In an image, you could see us all as we were, reclining in perfect ease of a spring afternoon. Sansa was sitting on one tree root in a white dress suited for a garden party, her hair loose and skirts waving in the wind. The sun caught hair and turned it to a river of fire, gold highlights leaping here and there from the shining amber. Bran straddled the root below her, his chair set off to the side somewhere, eating an apple and paging idly through a volume of Milton.His glasses sat in their favorite spot at the end of his nose.

Arya sprawled in the grass beside me, her head on my leg, her mouth yawning lazily while I obligingly fed grapes into it. She wore a waistcoat of black velvet and a pair of riding trousers, remnants of her outing on horseback that morning, and a glass of wine hung from two fingers of her right hand. Every so often she would pass it to me, and I would sip from it until some arbitrary counter indicated it was her turn again. We traded it back and forth in this fashion until both glass and bottle had been emptied.

But the feature of the painting, if it had been a painting, would have been Robb — Robb, our presiding angel, who sat high in the roots of the oak tree, one leg cocked and the other dangling loose in the air beneath him, resting his weight on one elbow and reclining like a Greek statue which occasionally breathed. He wore neither jacket nor waistcoat, and the two top buttons of his dress shirt gaped open in unusually rakish form. His eyes gazed out across the fields towards Winterfell, lingering on nothing in particular, but sweeping over the plains of his birthright with a kind of awestruck concentration, as though he understood the enormity of what had been handed to him and was committed to deserving it. His mouth moved in silent and unreadable fashion, teasing out some riddle that the rest of us could neither hear nor see.

As I watched him, he seemed to feel the weight of my stare on his cheek, and turned his head. When he caught me looking, he smiled. It was a king’s smile, an expression of infinite generosity and warmth; it descended without condescending, offered from a position not of arrogance but altitude. It reminded you of your status as his subject, and his as your benevolent liege, at the same time as it assured you that you were, for the moment, his chief and absolute concern.

So there we lounged, invulnerable in our happiness, five young immortals in the mere infancy of our godhood.


	7. Chapter 7

_Maidens & youths fling their wild arms in air  
_ _As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now  
_ _Bending within each other's atmosphere  
_ _Kindle invisibly; and as they glow  
_ _Like moths by light attracted & repelled,  
_ _Oft to new bright destruction come & go._

_—_ Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Triumph of Life”

* * *

I remember little of that Hilary term. Surely there were adventures, and outings, and snags of misfortune during the months that followed, and they were probably of great import to me at the time, but there was nothing so remarkable as to call my attention in the months afterwards. Robb taught me to drive. Loras’ grandmother came to a visit, an event from which I took several days to recover. The fencing team won its third league championship in as many years. My grades came in: negligible marks in naval history, but my Latin was remarkably good. Daenerys took me out to lunch to celebrate. Happy moments, fogged by time.

Towards the end of Hilary, Rhoynar College was set to have a ball. It was an occasion welcomed by most of the student population. We were all much anticipating the opportunity to drink ourselves silly on the college’s coffers and show off our finery, but before any of that could be accomplished there was the vexing matter of dates.

Presuming that she would enjoy the chance to dress up and attend a formal dance, I asked Sansa if she wouldn’t like to go as friends.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but are you sure?”

This was not, to put it lightly, what you wanted to hear. “Not that you have to,” I said quickly. “I just thought that we get along well, and if we both want to go, we might as well keep each other company.”

“Why, I’d love to go, yes — and if you mean it, I’d be more than happy to, but — Jon, am I the first person you asked?” She seemed confounded.

“Yes, why?”

“I’m the only one?”

“Why shouldn’t you be? We get along well—”

“You didn’t check whether anyone else had a date first?”

“What do you mean? Do you have a date already?”

She hesitated. “No,” she said tactically. “But I just wonder if you ought to be giving your ticket to me.”

I folded my arms. “Fine, then. Who else should I be giving it to?”

Sansa stared at me, and suddenly flung up her hands. “Daenerys,” she exclaimed. “You know, Targaryen! The woman who’s turned down four dates already because she’s waiting for someone in particular to ask, and she won’t tell anyone who, but I’ve got a good guess that it’s this quiet Northern fellow with a skull like absolute lead who just tried to offer his guest ticket to  _me!”_

I was dumbstruck. I said hoarsely, “Four?”

“Yes! Four.” She was breathing heavily. I had rarely seen her so worked up over anything. “Poor girl probably thinks you’ve forgotten her.”

“I haven’t,” I said meekly. “I just thought she’d have a date.” I had trusted with quiet resignation that she would swan in with some ludicrously rich prince or other on her arm, and that I would spend the evening sneaking looks at the pair of them from across the drinks table. I had not dreamed to think she would have waited on anyone’s account, least of all me.

“Well, now you know she doesn’t.” Sansa’s fingers drummed. “What are you going to do about it?”

“…Ask her?”

“Good. When?”

“…Soon?”

“Yes, excellent. As soon as possible, so she has time to get a dress. And be clear about your intentions. If you don’t mean to ask her as friends, be obvious about it.”

“But what about you? Haven’t you got a date?”

“I’ll make do,” she said dryly. She shooed me off, and I stumbled out of her room feeling rather dazed.

***

I asked Daenerys out for a walk in the Botanical Gardens. It happened to be a nice day, and the umbrella we had brought drifted at ease in my left hand. In the spring the garden was magnificent, rolls and frills of luxuriant foliage growing handsomely from either side of the path, blossoms forming on the trees, and heather springing in purple anklets around the roots. She held my arm, and we strolled along in the shade of some beech trees.

“So there’s this ball,” I said uncertainly. 

She nodded solemnly. “I have heard of such things,” she said.

“I’ve got a guest ticket, you know.”

“Most fortunate. A coveted item indeed.”

“Yeah, well — I don’t suppose—”

“Suppose what?” She smiled in the corner of my eye.

“Suppose that you’d like it. The ticket, I mean.”

“What,” she said archly, “as a gift?”

“Well — no—”

“For I’m flattered, but what I’d do with only one ticket to a ball, I’m not sure.”

“It was more of an invitation. To go.”

“To go where?”

“The ball.”

“Why, whomever with?”

“With m—  _Daenerys.”_

She broke out in a long laugh, hiding her face and clinging to my arm. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I really am. That was mean of me. Yes, Jon. I’ll go to the ball with you.”

I meant to scowl, but a grin wrestled its way through despite my best intentions and occupied my face rather completely. I must have looked sickeningly dopey. She saw my face and laughed again.

“Stop here,” she said, tugging on my arm. We stopped under the boughs of an old elm tree, and she stood up on tiptoe to press a kiss to the corner of my mouth.

My face flamed brilliantly warm. “Thanks,” I said, stupidly. “What was that for?”

“Impulse,” she said. Her own cheeks were polished faintly pink, too. “Anyway. Shall we walk on?”

***

Rhoynar Quad glittered like a fairy garden on the night of the ball. White tables stood on the grass, each dotted with a candle, and girls in gilded dresses floated through the grass on the arms of boys in resplendent white tie. A large white tent rose from the eastern end like an open sail, underneath which was a wide dance floor, and yellow light poured from a fleet of lanterns and spiderweb nets of holiday lights.

Daenerys wore a dress of pale blue gossamer, flecked with brassy inclusions, and a thick girdle of real metallic gold wrapped around her waist. Identical gold epaulettes capped each shoulder, and from them trailed a floor-length cape of the same material as her skirts, billowing gently in her wake. Her hair was wrapped into an elaborate crown of braids that evoked a distinctly royal flavor. Standing next to her, few people looked at me in my borrowed black tie, except for a handful who sent me the strange stares of someone noticing a vast disparity in a matched set.

We began our evening at a table with a few of her friends, none of whom I knew but several of whom seemed decent people. The Starks had all come separately, and we discovered each other gradually as the evening progressed. Arya had come alone, sporting a bow tie and tails in a manner so dignified and dashing that Fred Astaire would have envied her poise, and wielded a cane instead of her customary blade. She wore a white boutonnière and had pulled her hair back, so it was even harder than usual to distinguish her from the other men at the ball. Several ladies gave her appreciative glances behind her back, and at least one asked me for an introduction to my “younger brother.”

Sansa arrived shortly thereafter, wearing a sheer ball gown of rose gold and silver embroidery. Threads of diamonds dripped from both ears, and a beaded headband with a single feather capped her hair, an ornament borrowed from the style of American flappers. She carried a flute of champagne and had declined half a dozen invitations to dance before she even reached our table. Bran thrilled us all by showing up with a girl on his arm, a black-haired friend from chess club with the last name Reed, and Arya immediately hit it off quite splendidly with her.

Robb had brought a quiet, pretty girl named Jeyne Westerling, who none of us knew. He was in white tie and wore a red boutonnière to match Jeyne’s dress.

I asked Sansa if she knew her.

“Not well,” she whispered to me, as we watched them perambulate the dance floor in a crisp, formal waltz. “She’s in one of the social clubs, I think, but she’s not involved. Reading for science, if I remember.”

“How’d she meet Robb, then?”

“Heaven knows.”

Renly and Margaery paraded in fashionably late, dressed fit to break a million hearts, with Loras and some friend of Margaery’s in tow behind them. Loras’ escort disappeared early in the evening to go waltz with a handsome member of the Martell family, and he spent the rest of the night sinking deep in his cups and watching unhappily as his sister danced with her date. 

Theon Greyjoy made an appearance, surly and strapping in his naval uniform, and danced only once — with Sansa, of all people. Why she accepted his offer I don’t know, as they didn’t seem to bear all that much goodwill towards each other; they held each other at arm’s length during their quickstep, speaking in quiet, clipped tones and staring at some point over each other’s shoulders. I had never seen two people so evidently hostile relent to be so close to each other. When it was over, he bowed to her and made a swift exit, skirting the ballroom the long way round in what I realized later was a strategy to avoid running into Robb, who was chatting with some people just to their left. 

“What was that about?” I wanted to know.

Sansa settled gracefully back into her seat and accepted a new glass of wine from a waiter. “Don’t ask,” she said smoothly, and drank deep.

Dancing grew livelier as the night progressed. A little into the second hour of the proceedings, the band in the corner seemed to turn over a new leaf, and leapt into a vivacious jazz suite, which summoned a whole host of wallflowers and corner-dwellers into the center of the room like moths at the strike of a match. Arya materialized from the crowd and hauled me to my feet, insisting that I dance with her. Once I had secured a permissive nod from Daenerys, I allowed myself to be manhandled onto the dance floor, and reluctantly accompanied Arya through a subdued and sheepish variant of the Charleston. Initially, dancing in public was excruciating. It was only once I realized that everyone around me was either equally embarrassed, entirely shameless, or too drunk to care, that I began to have fun.

More drinks and more music. Around the fourth or fifth dance, Daenerys reappeared, sliding her arm through mine and inquiring mildly to Arya whether she might steal her date back. When she made to waltz with me, I confessed to her with due regret that I didn’t know how to dance properly, and she smiled.

“I’ll show you,” she said. “It’s much easier than Latin.” 

She took my right hand, and escorted my other to her waist — although by rights, she really ought to have been leading — and guided me in a fluid, graceful step around the edge of the room. I kept my hands were they were and rotated in place, and together we gave the impression that I knew what I was doing.

All the same, I felt better when the tempo piped up again, and we fell into the more casual jazz shuffle, the kind of which required no former knowledge but vague awareness of what the rhythm was and how your feet worked. The floor filled with bopping couples. Daenerys hiked up her skirts and hopped with the best of them, her cape fluttering madly in the effort, her face flushed and beaming. Around us, students jumped and shimmed and giggled, and I twirled her laughing under my arm.

_We’re all alone  
No chaperone can get our number  
The world’s in slumber  
Let’s misbehave!_

_There’s something wild about you, child_  
It’s so contagious  
Let’s be outrageous!  
Let’s misbehave!

After three dances she begged off a fourth on account of exhaustion, and we staggered, sweat-damp and dizzy, to the drinks table. Daenerys insisted on making our drinks. I watched with dawning horror as she stirred together a villainous combination of vodka, rum, tequila, gin, and other miscellaneous fixings served in a highball glass, a concoction she called a Dark Sister. We toasted; I promptly made the mistake of downing a large gulp of it, the way I would beer or wine, and became convinced that it had physically melted my liver.

“Lightweight,” she said gaily, and tipped back far more of it than should have been endurable.

As we drank, I noticed a new couple strolling through the entrance, their elaborate appearance made all the more conspicuous for being late. It was Jaime and Cersei, each wearing something that would not been out of place at a royal wedding — she in a crimson dress with long sleeves slit up to the shoulder, pearls layered over her throat and wrists in heavy chains; he in a dark red dinner jacket and gold pocket square, a white rose sitting in his buttonhole. With their golden hair and identical green eyes, they were an almost comically beautiful set, as if someone had shaped them without regard for realism or tasteful restraint.

“They’re late to the party,” I remarked to Daenerys. She followed my gaze.

“Goodness,” she said mildly. “Did they come from an audience with the king?”

The Lannisters drifted onto the dance floor without any seeming regard for the masses around them and segued into a seamless foxtrot, their steps unflaggingly matched and in perfect time. Many eyes followed them. It was hard not to be envious of their ease. This, it occurred to me, was probably their intention, and the ultimate end of their little entrance: it was not enough to be beautiful. They had to be so beautiful it made everyone else unhappy.

“Do you suppose they planned that?” I asked Daenerys. “Coming in late?”

“I would be surprised if they didn’t,” she said disinterestedly. “It’s a bit of a snub to the event, you see.”

“What do you mean?” 

“If this was a gathering of any particular importance, what they just did would have been unfathomably rude. In their circles it’s considered bad form to show up this late to a party unless there’s been a birth, a death, or an arrest.”

I considered. “Perhaps there was one, then,” I suggested.

She hummed in amusement. “Which? A death, or an arrest?” Her drink finished, she set the glass aside and nodded towards the Stark table, where Robb and Jeyne had joined Sansa and Arya at last. “Let’s sit, I’m still faint.”

In the coming hour I found myself sandwiched comfortably between to Robb and Daenerys, drifting aimless from one snatch of conversation to the next. Perhaps it was the drink, but we seemed to leap from one subject to another with no particular line of thought, and I lost track of the thread several times. By and by Daenerys became absorbed in an exchange about politics with Sansa to her left, and showed no sign of extricating herself in the near future, so I ended up talking mostly to Robb.

“It’s quite disappointing, really,” he was saying, with a nonplussed air. “Some people come to these things only to make connections, or what have you. As if it’s a political event. What I don’t understand is what makes this any different from, say — a school assembly, or even — you know, even a football game. It’s not as if we’re different people now than we are then. If anything, we’re less professional. But there he was, asking me about my father’s investments, whether or not he’d made up his mind about his profile for the next quarter, as though I was in any mood to field business inquiries. As if this was the place, if I were! I don’t understand it. Is there something about a tailcoat that turns everyone into Machiavelli?”

“I think there might be,” mused Jeyne. “Explains why parliament’s the way it is.”

“Ha, ha. No, really.” He shook his head. “I despise that sort of gesture. People who can’t set aside their ambitions, even for an hour,” he told me, “are not to be trusted.”

“Who was this?”

“Oh, I haven’t a clue. Some vassal house from the crownlands, I think. I don’t know if he even introduced himself.” Robb reached curiously for my glass. “Say, what the devil are you drinking, anyway? I’ve been wondering ever since you set it down.”

I pulled it away from him. “You wouldn’t care for it,” I assured him.

“What? Come on, don’t be greedy.”

Reluctantly, I pushed it towards him. He lifted the glass, sniffed it, and then took an appallingly large sip.

His eyes went wide, and he made a strange grimace, as if swallowing a particularly bitter or large bite of food. I watched its path down his throat play out in live fashion on his face. Slowly, he wet his lips and lowered the glass back to the table.

“I did tell you—”

“That,” he said, “is bloody fantastic. What is that?”

“Ask Daenerys.”

“You know, I think I will.”

The conversation lulled, and I absently fished up a random piece of trivia to fill the gap. “Did you see the Lannisters’ entrance?” I asked Robb.

He paused. “I didn’t know they were here,” he said. “When did they arrive?”

“Just an hour ago, about. They’re here together, I think… there,” I said, finally picking them out of the crowd, and I pointed for Robb’s benefit. They were alone together at a table in the corner, their chairs drawn close, observing the proceedings of the ball with an air of condescension. As we looked, Jaime leaned in and whispered something in Cersei’s ear. The corner of her lips quirked, and she turned her face towards his, addressing her reply to his cheek.

“Oh, hell,” Robb said angrily. Before I could gather my wits enough to ask what he meant, he stood up, raking back his chair, and cut a straight line towards their table. Stunned, I could only scramble up and follow. The girls called after us in confusion.

I had some trouble shoving through the crowd, which had parted begrudgingly for Robb and was disinclined to move again for me. As a consequence I arrived at the Lannisters’ table only some time after Robb, just in time to hear, “—think you’re  _doing_ , are you out of your two stone-stubborn  _minds_ —”

“Robb,” I said, touching his elbow. “What’s wrong?”

He shrugged me off, which sent several alarm bells hollering. “Nothing,” he said tightly. “Go back to the table.”

“But what’s happening?”

“ _Nothing_ , they — Jon, just go back, all right, I’ll be there in a moment—”

Cersei and Jaime wore expressions like those of the first soldiers to ever see a tank come rolling over the nearest hill.

“Listen, Stark,” Jaime said dangerously. He stood up, a movement which suddenly made clear how similar he and Robb were in height. “If you’ve got a problem you’d rather take outside—”

“I don’t want to take anything outside. I have absolutely no desire to draw any more attention to either of you tonight, and I should hope that you feel the same way.”

“Curious choice of words for someone currently making a scene,” Jaime said silkily, and indicated with a short movement of his head the collective attention they had garnered. It was true: Robb’s outburst had garnered quite a bit of interest from nearby tables, and a few couples had even stopped dancing to watch the altercation unfold.

Cersei held Jaime with a white-knuckled grip on his cuff. “Sit down,” she muttered.

“In a moment, dear.”

“Listen to your sister,” said Robb.

“Not until you tell me whether there’s anything you’d prefer to do outside.”

“Jaime, sit  _down_ .”

“I said in a moment.”

“Robb,” I said loudly. “People are staring.”

All three heads snapped as one towards me.

I gestured emphatically around us with a sweep of one arm. “I don’t know what this is about,” I said irritably, “but I thought you might like to know, in case you wanted to start conducting yourselves like members of the peerage again.”

Robb flinched a little, but I was irritated with him, too. “Or take it outside,” I added. “Whichever.”

He smoothed back his hair and took a tiny step back from the Lannister’s table. “Jon’s right,” he said. “This is inappropriate. We’re at a party, for goodness’ sakes.”

Jaime, still glowering, eased back into his seat. Cersei maintained her grip on his wrist.

“I meant what I said. But there’s a better time and place.”

“Flattering, Stark, but I’m taken.”

“Are you capable of sincerity? I mean are you capable of it at all?”

“Capable, but severely prejudiced against it. Look here, Stark, I think your bastard’s trying to get your attention.”

His bastard was indeed. “Robb,” I said, “could I speak to you privately?”

“Yes, shortly.”

“Now, please.”

“Can it wait?”

“No.”

“Does it have to—” He turned, and saw my face. “All right. Now, then.”

We left the Lannisters’ table and stepped outside the tent. Even once we had firmly left the earshot of anyone underneath it, I kept walking, my pace accelerating until Robb had to jog to keep up.

He seemed to realize that I was more upset than he had bargained for, and started trying to make amends.

“Jon,” he said, speaking quickly and under his breath, “Jon, I’m sorry you had to see that. It was wrong of me, you were right, I didn’t conduct myself at all like—”

I whirled on him. He reared back. 

“If my colour sergeant saw me acting like that,” I snapped, “he’d have me and anybody else involved digging trenches for a month afterwards. If it happened at a formal event, I’d be in confinement until graduation. If I’d done it to another lord’s son, I’d probably have been taken out back and  _shot_ .”

“I know. I do. I know. Jon—”

“People talk! You ought to know that by now! I’m a bastard from Castle Black, and even I know that people talk!”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, in coaxing tones. “It was a spur of the moment thing, there was nothing to it. Fights break out among lords’ sons all the time, you should see court balls—”

“Not with  _you!”_ I exploded, seizing at last on the real seed of my anger. “Not with you in them! Not with Robb Stark! What would Lord Stark think of that? Would he be proud of that, do you think? Starting a row with Jaime Lannister over — what,  _nothing?”_

“It wasn’t — it wasn’t nothing-nothing, it just—”

“Then what was it about, then? Tell me.”

Robb grew pained, and looked away. 

“Right,” I said furiously, “right. Glad to know you threw your reputation for something really worthwhile.”

“Jon, I can assure you, my good name will survive this.”

“I’m not worried about your good name! I don’t give a damn — no, I do, I do give a damn, but that wouldn’t bother me. It bothers me that you used to act if you knew how lucky you were to have a name even worth anything! That I thought you were  _different_ —”

“I am—”

“—from the kind of men who don’t care about their reputation—”

“I am. I do. You weren’t wrong.”

“Do you have any idea what I’d give to be a Stark?”

He stopped short, stricken.

I felt as if he had split a crack in my heart, and all the bitterness was pouring out of it, all the spite, all the stoppered sum of nineteen years without love. It boiled thick in my throat. It swam in my head. It flooded my veins and welled up in every corner, every crevice, every sliver and fault of me, until there was no part of me untouched by hatefulness.

“Any idea? Any. No. Because the answer is anything. I would give a hand. I would give a limb, even, an organ, anything, I would — I would cut out my  _heart_ —” I choked— “I don’t know what I wouldn’t do. I don’t care if you think that’s silly. I don’t care if it doesn’t matter to you, or if you don’t understand why, and I don’t think you do, I don’t even think you can. You don’t understand why it matters that I’m not family in name, do you? You never have.”

He was quiet. The frenetic urge to appease me had receded in him, and he clasped his hands behind his back, listening with calm patience. I scuffed my shoe in the grass.

I said, “I’m not worried about your honor, Stark. I’m angry you aren’t.”

He had nothing to say to that.

We retreated into ourselves, both of us probably gathering our composure. Somewhere, a spasm of laughter drifted across the lawn. An owl wept.

He was the first to speak.

“My honor,” he said, “is my life.”

His voice was edged like refined steel, sharp and cold as a sword under permafrost. 

Another pause, one where I could see him counting his words before he let them go. “If you think nothing else of me, I beg you to believe that much.”

I dragged a hand down my face. The night was so much darker here, away from the lights of the party. It was heavier, somehow, and the air more sour. I let out a humorless laugh. 

“Fuck, Robb, of course it is. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” He was shaking his head. “I should, if anybody. I should be on my knees. I just didn’t think about — but of course it would look that way. I should have thought of you. I’m sorry. I am. I didn’t  _think_ .” He was vicious, almost cruel to himself.

“I was the one who went off at you.”

“Rightfully so. Even if Lannister had done something far worse, it wouldn’t have been any excuse—”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not. Here I’ve ruined your evening—”

“No, you didn’t—”

“—and made an arse of myself, and now I’ve lost your good opinion—” He sounded wretched.

“No, never, never—” 

I reached for him. He slung his arm around my back, and I pulled him into a tight embrace.

“You haven’t lost my good opinion,” I said quietly. “You can’t be rid of it.”

“Good.”

“I was just cross with you. I’m sorry.”

He gripped my neck and pulled me back, his eyes shining. “You’re my brother, you know,” he said. “My brother. And I won’t say names don’t matter, because they do, but once I’m Lord of Winterfell—”

“Robb—”

“No, listen. Once I’m Lord of Winterfell, I’ll fix things so they don’t. I’ll draw up the papers, and do what should have been done nineteen years ago. You’ll be Jon Stark, as you ought to be.”

I could not speak, for my throat had closed over entirely. He hugged me again, tighter than ever. I closed my eyes against the hot wave of prickles that surged behind them.

Soldiers often boast of being willing to die for their country. Soldiers are often lying. These are cheap promises of sacrifice; very few understand what it means to die for something. But I will tell you: it means to love it so utterly that you are overshadowed by it, occupied by it, possessed by it. It means to be consumed, not by the subject of your feelings, but by the very feelings themselves. You become a servant to your own devotion. Your life is a token to lay down at the altar of your love.

Have you ever been willing to die for something? I have. I can tell you how it feels.

***

When we returned to the party, it was already dwindling in size. The flock of dancers had thinned to a mere coagulation, and empty tables were propping up here and there. Groups peeled off and went staggering into the night, their clothes rumpled, their hair mussed, but emitting an air of bedraggled satisfaction. I found Daenerys, and we agreed that it was time to leave.

Glittering shrapnel scattered the garden. Streamers lay limp on the grass like dead snakes besides piles of confetti, bits of tulle, sequins, beads, and feathers which struggled and twitched in the breeze. Fairy lights cast a dull glaze over the scene. I strolled through it all without really taking it in. My chest was warm with a rich sort of exhaustion.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked.

“Hm? Oh, yes.”

“I’m glad. I did, too.”

She leaned on my arm while stepping over a puddle. “I like your family,” she remarked absently, tugging them free of the snag. “They’re quite nice people.”

“I saw you talking to Sansa.”

“Yes, she’s marvelous. We had a wonderful conversation in Ancient Greek.”

“No stray vengeful feelings, then? No stray impulses towards familial retribution?”

“Oh, naturally. They’re scum and traitors, but charming scum and traitors. I shall guillotine them last, when I retake the throne.”

“My queen is most generous.”

“She is,” she demurred, and I laughed and elbowed her.

We passed through a deserted courtyard where a small fountain burbled. Atop its pedestal, a fat winged cherub aimed an arrow at the sky, from which jetted a slim thread of water. As we circumnavigated the dais, someone else came into view from behind it: a girl, sitting hunched on the lip of the fountain. She was quite tall and broad-shouldered, with muscles I myself envied running up and down her arms, and had short, thin yellow hair. Her pink dress was stained at the bottom, as if she had run through a thicket or muddy field recently, and she was crying.

Daenerys made a small, irrepressible sound of sympathy, and the girl looked up like a scared animal. At once she stood and curtsied to both of us.

“Are you hurt?” I said.

“No,” she said. She edged backward. “If you’ll pardon me, milord, milady.”

She obviously didn’t know who I was. “If you’re sure you’re all right,” I said worriedly, but by then she had turned and ran away.

Daenerys clucked her tongue. We resumed walking at a more sedate pace. “Sweet girl,” she said. “I’m sure someone was just awful to her tonight.”

“Do you know her?”

“That was the Countess of Tarth,” she said sadly, “and she has very bad luck in friends.”

But she would not elaborate, claiming that it was no night for gossip.

I walked her to her dorm. She opened the door and then stood there for a moment, silhouetted against its light, while I fidgeted with my hands in my pockets and felt jittery and uncertain. Somewhere, a clock tolled three times.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she said, presently.

“What? Oh, no, thanks.”

She tilted her head. “Are you sure?”

“That’s all right. It’s a bit late.”

“Are you sure I can’t tempt you?”

“I’m not thirsty, thanks.”

Daenerys pursed her lips. Abruptly, she took me by the collar and kissed me on the mouth.

“Oh,” I said.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Jon?”

“Yes,” I agreed, “very much,” and she shut the door behind me.


	8. Chapter 8

_Achilles, Achilles, Achilles, come down, won't you  
Get up off, get up off the roof?  
The self is not so weightless  
Nor whole and unbroken  
Remember the pact of our youth_

_—_ Gang of Youths, “Achilles Come Down”

* * *

The next morning we awoke at some hedonistic hour, closer to noon than sunrise, and hauled ourselves out of bed. I took her to breakfast at a small tea shop near Rhoynar College, where she ate a pain au chocolat and drank three cups of espresso in quick succession. I had as much toast as my stomach — which still carried a grudge against me for the amount of alcohol imbibed the night previous, and made a point of reminding me so every few minutes — would permit, and between coffee and a Bloody Mary I eventually ceased to feel at war with my internal organs. Our table was shouldered against the window, and we had a first-rate view of the street, where people hurried back and forth under the shells of their umbrellas like black turtles, their coats turned up against the chill. It was raining, not in the malicious sheets that it often did, but a lazy patter that drummed softly on windowpanes, and suffused the scene with a hazy silver sort of light.

I walked her back to her dorm after breakfast, and bid her goodbye. I returned to my room in the highest possible spirits, feeling brimful of contentment and also ready for a sizable nap.

To my grave surprise, Sansa was waiting by my door when I arrived. Her face was drawn. She wore a hat which gravely clashed with her shoes, to say nothing of her scarf, and it was by this that I knew something was wrong.

“Sansa—?”

“Oh, there you are,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to find you all morning — we gave you a call, but Loras said you weren’t here. Where have you — well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Come quickly,” and she linked her arm through mine like a crane hooking itself around a piece of cargo. Abruptly I was steered around and hustled off in the direction I came.

She walked with the brisk, long strides of someone barely restraining herself from running. We trotted out of the building and cut diagonally across the quad, splashing midmorning dew and mud around our ankles. This was another thing I had never known Sansa to do, and I grew quite alarmed.

“Is someone hurt?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

“An altercation. Listen, it’s better for us to speak privately. That’s why I came to fetch you.”

“What do you mean by altercation? And where are we gong?”

“Back to the apartment,” she said, as if it were obvious. “That’s where the others are.”

We climbed the steps of the Hampden Building two at a time, whirling around and around the ancient spiral staircase. By the time we reached their hallway, I was hurrying ahead of Sansa. My imagination churned out a creative register of catastrophes: something of immense value had been stolen; the apartment had been robbed and ransacked; someone had been expelled.

I flung myself at their door and hammered on it. Instantly Arya hauled it open, hissing, “Stop yammering, you’ll rouse the whole floor,” and waved me inside. Sansa caught up to me, breathing rather hard and faintly pink, and as soon as she crossed the threshold Arya closed and locked the door behind her. 

I didn’t bother taking off my raincoat. The three of us stormed into the living room, where I looked around somewhat wildly for the source of all my agitation; I think at that point I was honestly prepared for a murder scene. The room was perfectly normal. Every object was where it ought to be, not even a mite of dust out of place. The curtains were drawn back, and a fire tongued the grate. It was quiet except for the peaceful lave of rain against the windows.

Bran sat in his chair by the fire, staring into it with the expression of a man trying to read Linear A. He looked up when I came in, and nodded a perfunctory hello before returning to his thoughts.

Robb was stationed in the window with his back to the room, looking solemnly out across the vista. His stance was relaxed — one knee cocked, a hand slipped in his pocket, and a cigarette nestled between the first and second knuckles of his other — but a rigid line asserted itself in the set of his jaw. Every so often he blew smoke in a steady jet against the glass.

Sansa slipped past me and folded herself into an armchair. Bran reached out and patted her hand, absently, without looking.

“What’s happened?” I said.

Arya came out of the kitchen wiping her hands. “Jaime fuckin’ Lannister is what happened.”

“Language.”

“Piss off, Sansa, d’you think now’s the time?”

“What do you mean?” I felt close to tearing my hear out. “What did he do?”

“Came here, didn’t he? Barged in here around two in the morning, going on about some rubbish none of us made out — probably so drunk he couldn’t have spelled his own name — and called Robb a prat. Then he tried to punch him.”

“What?” I gaped, and turned to Sansa for denial or proof: she nodded. I tried to envision it, and found I couldn’t. The idea of a drunken Jaime standing in the Starks’ living room and actually taking a swing at Robb was too much for my suspension of disbelief. It seemed too overwrought, too much like a scene out of a play.

“Didn’t manage it,” Arya added. “Robb moved, and then I socked him in the gut before he had the chance to land another. Put him on the floor. I would’ve sent him home with a pair of black eyes, too, for the mere audacity of it, but he left in a hurry after that.”

Robb smiled faintly. I suspected that he was watching a reprisal of the encounter in his mind’s eye.

“You struck him?” I wavered between horror and delight.

“Sure did.”

“What if he tells someone? Aren’t you afraid of the repercussions?”

“Good question,” muttered Sansa.

“Nah,” Arya said easily. “He attacked Robb first, and he was under our roof to boot. It was obviously an act of self-defense. Besides, he’d never actually go to the authorities with it; then he’d have to admit he got walloped by a girl.”

Despite the circumstances, she sounded deeply pleased. I deduced that for Arya this had been the achievement of a long-time dream of hers, and she was thrilled by her luck at having acquired a perfectly legitimate excuse to fulfill it.

“It was a thing of beauty,” Bran said fervently. “Like watching Caravaggio paint.”

“It’s a charge of violent battery against the Prime Minister’s son, if he decides to tell anybody about it,” snapped Sansa, “and our best hope for the fallout is that he’s more proud than he is willing to hold a grudge.”

“Ah, c’mon, Sansa, you liked it, too.” Arya leered, smug. “Last night you said you thought he deserved it.”

“I do think he deserved it. But that doesn’t hold up in a court of law.”

“I told you, it was self-defense.”

“You weren’t the one he was swinging for!”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Robb, stepping out of the window. We all turned to him, like a nest of sunflowers angling towards the sun. “He won’t press charges. Arya’s right, he’d first have to admit that he tried to start a fight with us in our own house.”

He flicked the butt of his cigarette into the fireplace and sat down in his armchair. It was a punctuating gesture, like a full-stop or exclamation point: meant to end the debate.

“I don’t see why you’re being so cavalier about this,” Sansa said curtly. “It’s serious. Jaime Lannister tried to threaten you—”

“He called me a prat and had a go at me, Sansa, it’s hardly a declaration of war.”

“—and reacted with physical violence! At no provocation! He’s clearly disturbed—”

“Well, no one’s arguing that much.”

“—and we need to do something about him!”

“What do you want me to do?” he said irritably, rounding on her. “Ring the police? Tattle to their father? Start a manhunt because some bloke I had a row with at a party showed up drunk on my doorstep?”

“We did do something about him,” Arya muttered. “Or I did something about him, at least.”

“ _You_ didn’t help,” said Sansa.

“Did so. I saved Robb’s life.”

Robb chuckled. “You did not.”

“I did so. He was clearly going for your neck.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Was.”

“Wasn’t.”

“Was.”

“Clearly wasn’t, and I think I’d have noticed if he did.”

“Was, and I saved you from it,” Arya retorted. “You ought to have me for a bodyguard.”

“My own little guard dog.”

“Wolf,” she corrected, grinning. They exchanged a private and ferocious sort of smile.

He turned to me. “Jon,” he said unexpectedly, “what do you think of all this? You’re the only one who saw our exchange last night.”

“What exchange?” demanded Sansa.

“Oh, Jaime and I had a little chat at the ball,” Robb said, watching me carefully. “Things got rather heated, and I’m ashamed to say I pushed them out of hand. Jon managed to defuse the situation. In my opinion, that’s why he came over — still wound up from our row. But Jon would be able to say better than me.”

I doubted that very much, and shifted uncomfortably under the weight of their attention. “It’s hard to tell,” I said. “I don’t know him very well. He might have still been mad at Robb.”

“Was it bad enough that he would attack him for it?” said Sansa, wringing her hands.

“Well, not in my opinion. But that’s if you’re asking me. I haven’t a clue what Jaime would or wouldn’t pick a fight over.” It was true. Even if I claimed any understanding of the elaborate set of rules and customs which governed their lives, I could not begin to understand the minds of the aristocracy. I had no purview into the obscure mechanisms of Jaime’s brain. 

“Fair enough,” said Robb. “But he did try to escalate things, remember? At the ball?”

I did. “He kept asking if you wanted to take things outside,” I said.

“Mm-hm. And he probably would’ve, too, if you hadn’t steered me away.”

“Well, I suppose.” In my opinion it had sounded more like blustering, but it was hard to doubt Robb; he knew Jaime better than I did.

“Maybe he drank too much and decided to try again,” he suggested idly. “It’s easy enough to believe. Jaime’s a bit hotheaded, when you get him in a corner. Or maybe after his sister left, there was just nobody to hold him back.”

Either was plausible. I shrugged. “Could be.”

Sansa shifted forward to lean on her knees. “But do you think he’s dangerous?” she said, her voice brimming with urgency.

Robb gestured at me, as if batting the question physically into my court. I cleared my throat and tried to avoid the watery plea of her stare. “No,” I said. “I mean, he’s powerful, but I don’t think Robb said anything to provoke serious violence. From what I hear, he didn’t really want to hurt Robb, just scuff up his pride a little.” 

She cringed, still unhappy. “Look at it this way,” I said, trying to comfort her. “Jaime’s a dueling prodigy. Drunk or not, I expect he could out-fence most of England with one hand tied, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t like him. But he’s not built for brawling. Robb’s got fifteen centimetres and two stone on him, and even drunk he isn’t stupid enough to start a fistfight under those terms. If he’d really wanted to hurt Robb, he would’ve brought his sword.”

Arya said, “And then I’d have thrashed him in the gutter,” but in a comforting way.

“That,” Robb said, “is an excellent point, thank you, Jon. See, Sansa? It’s doesn’t mean anything. No need to worry.”

“No need to worry? No need to  _worry?_ All you’ve proven is that he didn’t want to actually kill you! You’ll forgive me for not being relieved!”

“Calm down a mite, someone’ll hear you,” muttered Arya. It was such a reversal of their normal roles — Sansa shouting and raising a fuss, Arya calmly asserting the rules of decorum — that for a moment I had the dizzy sense of being in a dream.

Sansa folded her arms and glowered at Robb. “What did you start a row with him about, anyway? That’s unlike you.”

He glanced at me. “It was over nothing, really,” he said. “It was a foolish move on my part. Jon set me straight, afterwards.”

“Well, thank the gods,” she snapped, “at least I’m not the only one in the room with sense.”

Bran, who had kept largely quiet until now, came out of his reverie. “There’s not much use in arguing about it. Either he will make a deal of it, in which case we won’t know until his next move and we’ll make ourselves miserable being anxious about it until then, or he won’t and we’ll do the same for no reason. In both cases, worrying about it doesn’t do us any good.”

“Just so. Just so.” Robb nodded. “In that spirit, why don’t we have a round of drinks? I picked up limes the other day, and there’s still some rum in the icebox. We can make daiquiris.”

These were Sansa’s favorites, and his choice of suggestion was unlikely to be a coincidence. I thought it a little obvious, and likely it was to Sansa, too, but she must have either been too exhausted to continue scolding or in dire want of a drink (or both). She relented, and Robb went into the kitchen to make us a tray of daiquiris. I remember the taste of them to this day: sharp and sweet, served over a bed of fresh ice, the kick of lime juice interwoven with the honeyed flavor of the sugar and rum.

***

I stayed with them for the rest of the day. It felt wrong to leave with such a fog of tension hovering over the apartment. Sansa was inconsolate, spending half the time locked in her room and the other half furiously doing chores in order to give her hands something to do that was not wring themselves. She was finally pulled away from the kitchen by Robb, who alternated between doing work at his desk and pacing aimlessly around the apartment, striking up conversations with anyone and everyone who happened to fall within earshot. Bran read, which would not have been unusual in the slightest except that during the one stretch of time in which I bothered to watch him, he failed to turn one page in the space of half an hour. Nobody would leave, even for errands or a spot of fresh air. We were all bound by the same iron sense of propriety which forbid us from being the first to abandon ship.

Arya was the only one in a good mood. Punching out Jaime Lannister had done wonders for her disposition, and she seemed to float around on a cloud of her own goodwill towards the world for the rest of the day. She failed to evince even the slightest degree of worry about the possible repercussions of last night’s events. To her, the event had been as simple and conclusive as the fight: blows had been struck, and the better side won.

“Sansa’s fussing over nothing,” she said. We were sitting on her bed and playing a game of beggar-my-neighbor, the cards spread out on the coverlet between us. Arya’s room was a space of adequate size made considerably smaller by all the clutter that filled it: clothes were strewn over the desk and dumped on the floor, empty tea sets stacked on the dresser, and a jar of aged peonies on her bedside table. Her fencing gear sat in a bag by the door, which I had tripped over coming in.

“She’s scared for Robb.”

“I know she’s scared for Robb. She shouldn’t be, is what I’m saying.”

“You don’t think Jaime will be a problem?”

“Jaime’s always a problem. But he’s always been a problem, and he always will be a problem. That’s the thing about being a git, you’re always liable to muck something up.”

“Sansa seems to think this is different from normal.”

“I’ll bet you my left tit it isn’t. And if it is, so what? The Lannisters have been on bad terms with us since before you or I were born,” she said tiredly. “What are they going to do? Hate us some more?”

“They’re powerful people.”

“We’re powerful people. Hell, between the five of us, we’re a proper army. And if Jaime makes trouble for Robb, we’ll make some trouble right back. I know where I’d place my bets.” She slapped down an ace, and I reluctantly forked over four of my cards.

Day segued into evening, paused, and then tumbled wholly into night. After dinner, we lingered around for a while, putting away dishes and cleaning up the table settings with more slowness than the task demanded. At one point all of us were packed into the kitchen in a chaotic medley of elbows and murmured apologies. It was a thin pretext to be near to each other, but it was a shared one, so it remained unremarked upon.

There was no music and dancing after dinner. The Starks retreated one by one to their rooms, shutting doors and turning off lights, until the whole apartment was dim and quiet. Bran was the last to retire, having stayed up to keep me company while the others retreated. With his departure, I stood to leave.

“Oh, no,” he said, waving me down. “Please, it’s late. You can stay the night. I’m sorry we don’t have a guest suite for you, but we’ve got some spare blankets and pillows.”

“I shouldn’t overstay my welcome.”

“You couldn’t possibly.” He hesitated. “I don’t want to pressure you, but I think Sansa might feel better if we were all here tonight.”

I relented, and he fetched me some spare bedding from the linens closet. We set up a makeshift cot on the couch, fashioned from starched sheets and pillows which at some point had hosted a thriving colony of moths. It was still not the worst place I had ever slept. 

“Help yourself to a nightcap,” he added when we were finished, indicating the liquor cabinet. “Lord knows we all could use one. And knock if you need anything, of course.”

“Thanks.”

He waved it away over his shoulder. “See you tomorrow,” he called, wheeling himself towards his room. “Sleep well.”

“Sleep well,” I echoed. Then, tugging off my shoes and draping my jacket awkwardly over the armrest, I laid down on the couch.

I slept fitfully. I was neither uncomfortable nor cold but for some reason I could not manage more than a full hour of rest that night, periodically jolting awake at the merest provocation — some whisper of wind against the windows, or a creak of the floorboards in the apartment above us. My brain clung to consciousness with the rigor that a drowning man does a lifesaver. The dying coals in the grate cast strange shadows over the ceiling, and I lay awake for hours staring at them, grappling for patterns in their shapes. At one point it started raining, a misty drizzle similar to the weather this morning; then it stopped again. I tossed and did not sleep.

Sometime around four or five, when I was almost despairing of rest at all, a door opened in the hallway. It eased shut with a minute click, as with someone attempting to make little or no noise. I assumed it was someone going to the bathroom, which was at the other side of the hall — but then footsteps grew nearer to me, and I went still.

The person passed around the back of the sofa and into the entryway. They stepped lightly on the hardwood, their soles barely making so much as a squeak, and picked their way soundlessly through the minefield of clutter that decorated the hallway. The telltale groan of the overstuffed coatrack informed me that they had retrieved their overcoat.

I twisted around and risked a glance over the back of the sofa. It was Robb, dressed in the same suit that he wore yesterday, preparing himself as if to leave the apartment. As I watched, he shrugged on his overcoat, touched up his tie, and fidgeted briefly with his ring in the hallway mirror, looking for all the world like a man with places to be at four o’clock in the morning. His did not appear to have slept recently, or at all.

He stood in the entryway composing himself for a minute more. Then, with a quiet scrape of the deadbolt, he stepped out into the night. 

In the aftermath, the silence of the apartment seemed absolute and cacophonous. I waited, hardly breathing, for the space of perhaps a minute. Then I snatched up my shoes and jacket and followed him.

I regained sight of him walking through the far end of Andal Quad, his silhouette just barely caught by the dull gas glow of the streetlights, and I continued to tail him at a distance. He was heading due east, toward and past the Botanical Gardens, and in more or less a straight line out of town. As the buildings thinned around us, I noticed that he was taking well-lit main roads, not back ones or alleys, and acting in no particular effort not to be noticed. Indeed, trailing him was almost easy. He strolled along as if there were nothing unusual at all about taking a stroll at four o’clock AM.

He broke off from the main streets at last to take a little dirt path that lead into the woods. The ground under our feet crunched with frost, and the occasional bit of twig or loose pebbles crackling underfoot threatened to announce my presence at regular intervals. I had to take pains not to be noticed, remaining at what I considered to be well outside of earshot and ducking behind trees. I was so preoccupied with remaining inconspicuous that I didn’t notice when he stopped walking, and almost ran into him.

I stumbled, stepped on two twigs at once, and dove into the cover of a bunch of trees. He hadn’t seen me — he was still facing forward — but he paused, and from the tilt of his head I knew he had heard.

“Jon,” he said.

The eeriness of his apparent super-sensory awareness, combined with the decidedly spooky nature of our surroundings, made me flinch briefly in fear. Then I sighed, and stepped out from behind the trees. “How did you know it was me?”

“Arya wouldn’t have gotten caught,” he said calmly, and then surprised me: “Come on. We’ll walk together.”

He waited while I closed the distance between us, and set off again at a moderate clip. We were trailing deeper and deeper into the woods, the route beneath us shrinking from road to trail to footpath and then to a mere suggestive gap in the undergrowth. It was a still, wet night, lit by the faint touch of a full moon, and the woods smelled of rotting wood and petrichor.

“Did I wake anybody else?” he asked casually.

“No. Just me.”

“That’s good. Not that I’m trying to keep secrets from them, but with these sorts of things, it’s the fewer the better.” 

“Aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Trying to keep secrets. I mean, you didn’t tell anyone you were going anywhere.”

“I choose to believe,” he said delicately, “that there is a difference between lying and not telling. One is usually malicious, and the other is occasionally well-meant. Does that make me a hypocrite?”

“I think so.”

“Hm. Very well, then.”

He ducked under a log that had fallen partially across our path. I followed with less grace, staggering out from underneath it with a flagging step. 

“I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing out here.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“It’s nothing nefarious, I can assure you.”

“I know it’s not,” I said loyally, but thought of the traitorous glimmer of wariness that had flared when he first left the apartment.

“Thank you. I have some business that needs taking care of, that’s all. It was just easier to do it out here, and at this time. Fewer questions all around.”

“What if someone else wakes up and sees you’re gone?”

“Oh, I lock my room at night. It’s an indispensable practice, really, when you have younger siblings. None of them will notice I’m out until morning, and I’ll be long back by then.”

“From where?” I wondered aloud.

“Nowhere in particular. I mean that quite literally, it’s an utterly random spot. That’s why it’s ideal. You’ll see.” He pulled up short, and we stopped in a small puddle of moonlight. He rounded on me and fixed me with such a stare that my heart almost stopped. “Jon, can you swear to keep a secret for me?”

My pulse thundered in my ears. “Yes,” I said, unhesitating.

“I don’t just mean a petty, personal secret. I mean something important. Something that you’ll be tempted — and I mean sorely tempted — to share. I need you to give me your word that you won’t.”

“You have it.”

“Swear it on something,” he said relentlessly. “Swear it on something that’s important to you.”

I cast around for something that would qualify. I hadn’t a family name, or family honor, although I had the feeling he would have permitted me to borrow either of his; I grasped at last on something which I could give him of my own.

“I swear on my mother,” I said.

He squeezed my arm, as if sealing a pact, and in that ghostly, silent bath of moonlight, it was easy to half believe that we were.

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to meet with Jaime Lannister.”

Then he started walking again.

It took my brain a full three or four seconds to restart itself, like an engine stalled on the roadside. When it did—

_“Why?”_

“Because I’ve got a secret of his,” he said calmly. “And he rather wants to know what I’m going to do with it.”

“What secret?”

He sent me a disappointed look.

“You’re joking.”

“Did you really think I would break my word?”

“You gave your word to that arsehole? After he tried to deck you?”

“I gave my word to that arsehole,” he said, “long before he tried to deck me, or do anything else to me, as a matter of fact. I’ve been under oath to him since before winter vacation.”

I gaped. “For  _what?”_

“That would also, incidentally, be breaking my word.”

“Gods be good — all right, then, can you at least tell me what you  _do_ intend to do with this secret of his? Or is that breaking another vow of yours?”

“No,” he said breezily. “That one I can give you for free. I’m going to keep it.”

“His secret.”

“Yes.”

“Is it very dangerous?”

He tipped his head back for a moment in thought. I have often found that when people do this, they are not actually deciding how to answer, but attempting to find the way of phrasing said answer that is least likely to aggravate the person hearing it.

“Not to me,” he said finally. He stepped over a thicket of nettles.

“So it is to him.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a secret if it wasn’t.”

“And he told it to you,” I said skeptically.

“Not directly.”

“You found him out?”

“I put several clues together, made a calculated deduction, and then presented him with my evidence. Once he’d stopped blustering and denying it, he told me.” 

“Wasn’t he angry?”

“Oh, extraordinarily,” he said cheerfully.

“But you’re not worried?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

With this somewhat chilling declaration, he brushed aside a clump of branches obscuring our path and held them for me. I sidled through, simmering with unease.

“So if you found out about this secret in November,” I said, “or even earlier, why’s it taken him until now to ask you about it?”

“We had an arrangement,” Robb said simply. “That arrangement was broken, and a re-negotiation of the terms is in order.”

“You broke it? Or he did?”

Another disappointed look.

“All right, then, what’d he — you know what, never mind.”

“Thank you.”

We were winding gradually upwards. The ground slanted beneath our feet, and my calves burned with the increasing effort of ascending the hill. The trees closed in around us as we retreated from civilization, and the effort of pushing through the undergrowth increased exponentially. I felt sometimes as though I were battling a living organism which was not only uncooperative, but wished me immense harm.

“Is it all right that I’m coming? I mean, won’t Jaime be unhappy to see me there?”

“If he sees you, yes,” he said. “But technically, guests don’t violate the terms of our meeting.”

“Terms?”

He drew from his interior breast pocket a small white calling card, embossed with a roaring lion. A few sloppy lines of black scrawl were scribbled on the back. He passed it to me.

> _Meet at the place 5AM. Much to discuss. JL_

“Well, he’s nobody’s poet, is he.”

Robb smiled. “He dropped that off earlier today — or yesterday, now, I suppose. Slipped it in with the post during his visit. I expect he only picked a fight with me to play off the whole encounter, and make it seem less suspicious to the rest of them — of course, he doesn’t quite realize that staggering in and pretending to start a drunken brawl isn’t exactly the kind of thing that deflects suspicion.”

I flipped the card over. There was no more script. “‘Meet at the place’?” I quoted.

“That’s our meeting spot. It’s coming up here by the ridge. It’s where we hashed out the initial agreement, back in November.”

We were indeed coming up on a ridge. I could see distantly where the trees thinned out and moonlight leaked through the gaps. As we grew closer, I made out a steep ravine that cleaved the edge of the clearing, its depths wide and treacherous like a yawning wound in the earth. The trees drew back from the lip of the ravine, as if they, too, were afraid of the fall. It left only a slender shelf of land between tree line and cliff.

“Odd place for a meeting,” I remarked.

He chuckled. “He found it, actually. Back when we were both freshers. Fell upon it by accident, really, just poking around. It’s a great meeting spot. Isolated, hard to get to, not on any map. But easy to find if you know the way there.”

“Did he spend a great deal of time gallivanting through the woods, as a fresher?” I inquired.

He did not laugh, as I expected him to. “It’s useful to have a place you know is private,” he said cryptically, and walked on.

We approached the edge of the clearing. He paused while we were still thickly enshrouded in the trees. “I’m not sure you should announce yourself,” he said. “He’ll probably think I’ve told you everything, and he’s unlikely to take it well. It’s better if you just hide out and watch from afar.”

“Do you want me to turn back?” Even as I offered, I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have left Robb to meet with Jaime alone any more than I could have lopped off my own right arm, and even then, I would have done the latter sooner.

“No, stay. You might as well. Just—” He hesitated, darted a glance into the clearing, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Wait here.”

“All right.”

He smiled at me. Then he strode into the clearing, his hands in his pockets, walking with the easy lope of a man who for all the world had nothing to hide.

I crept forward a little in the underbrush so I could see. Robb planted himself in the middle of the glade, whistling a faint tune. It didn’t take long after that for his counterpart to emerge: within minutes, Jaime materialized from the undergrowth on the opposite side of the clearing.

Instinctively, I drew back into the shelter of the tree. It was only once I felt assured that he could not or would not see me — his attention was focused wholly on Robb, and with good reason — that I peered around the trunk.

“Hello, Jaime,” said Robb.

“Stark.”

To my great relief, Jaime had not brought his sword. Both of them stood unarmed.

“Is she coming?” Robb asked.

“No.”

“Well, that’s a bit counterproductive, isn’t it.”

His tone was pleasant, but it was glazed with a layer of ice.

“I speak for both of us,” said Jaime.

“If you say so.”

Neither of them spoke for a while, then. At length, Jaime said, “We ought to talk about the ball.”

“What about it?” Robb’s reply came fast and sharp. “The music? The drinks? Or how you affronted everyone in attendance with a blatant display of—”

“We didn’t  _blatantly_ display anything, Stark. You were the one who saw fit to make it a subject of public scrutiny.”

“Because you were breaking our pact.”

“‘Our pact,’” sneered Jaime. “‘Our pact.’ If I had a quid for every time I’d heard the word ‘our pact,’ I wouldn’t need a bloody inheritance.”

“You ought take it more seriously.”

“If I took it seriously, I’d never speak to my sister again in my life,” he snapped. “If I took it seriously, I’d be fucking miserable. Did you ever think about that? Or were you too busy getting off to the sounds of us bending over backwards for you to even consider—”

“If you’re going to be crude, Jaime, I can leave.”

“I know you can,” Jaime seethed, with surprising venom. “Oh, I know you can. Don’t you think I do? Don’t you think that I’m perfectly aware of how Saint Robb Stark can swan off whenever he likes, break our agreement, and ruin my life without so much as a by-your-leave? Whereas I have to hover at his beck and call for the sake of a measly  _promise_ that he won’t?”

“You’re not at my beck and call,” he said, “and the terms of the agreement were quite lenient, considering. If you had some objection to them, you should have told me, instead of breaking them.”

“Objection! Objection? Of course I fucking object to them! D’you think I didn’t fucking ‘object’ to never being seen with my sister in public?”

“That’s a very strict interpretation of what I said.”

“It’s the only interpretation! But you were blackmailing the both of us, so of course we didn’t fucking  _object_ —”

“I never blackmailed you,” Robb said, thunderous and shockingly cold.

“What the devil would you call it, then?”

“I wouldn’t call it anything. I never threatened to tell anyone anything, even if you broke the agreement, and it’s not my fault if you labored under that impression without asking me.”

Jaime rolled his eyes. “Of course. And the sword of Damocles isn’t really a threat, it’s just a nice reminder.”

“Why did you come here,” Robb asked coolly, “if you think I’m such a brute? Hm? Why bother to negotiate at all? Clearly I’m not so irrationally invested in your destruction that I can’t be reasoned with.”

I shifted uncomfortably at the chill in his words. I had never seen him so deeply and evidently furious; even with he had fought with Jaime at the party, his anger had been nine tenths irritation, skin-deep, easily skimmed off by some fresh air and distance. This seemed like it couldn’t be carved out of him with a hunting knife.

“We’d like to renegotiate,” Jaime said.

“Obviously. What are your terms?”

“First,” he said, counting it off on his fingers, “and most basically, we’d like to be seen with each other out in public without you taking the skin off our backs. And we’d like freedom of association, particularly re: each other. We’ve found it’s ever so dear to us.”

“That condition was for your own benefit, it was to prevent other people getting curious—”

“Which is why you shouldn’t mind at all if we remove it,” Jaime said smoothly. “It’s not for your benefit, is it?”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s important.”

“Not to us.”

“For someone in your situation, you display a shocking lack of self-interest.”

“Darling, self-interest is the only kind I’ve got.”

They regarded each other with equal dislike. Robb’s glower made no purchase against Jaime’s smarmy smile.

“Your other terms,” Robb gritted out.

“Oh, the works. We’d love some material assurance that you aren’t going to ruin us utterly, but failing that, we’d like your word and a promise of your secrecy in writing, which will probably do most of fuck all but will make us feel infinitely better. And a puppy. We’d like a puppy.”

“You’re not taking this seriously, are you?”

“Come to that one by yourself, did you?” Jaime snorted, and he began to pace. He moved from nine o’clock to eight o’clock on the field, with me standing at six. Robb matched him by shifting from two to twelve. “No, I’m not taking it seriously. The negotiations or the blackmailing. You see, we don’t think there can be an agreement, anymore.”

Robb paused in the process of shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You don’t.”

“No. We thought there could be. We thought, ‘well, everyone’s always going around about this guy’s honor, and how noble the Starks are, maybe he’s not an absolute fascist, let’s give him a go.’ Turns out, we were stark raving. You can’t live with anybody holding that much over you. It’s too easy for them to punish you. Tempting, even. You taught us that one, Robb, at the ball.” His voice was rich with loathing. “Do you know what we were thinking, while you threw your little fuss? We were thinking, ‘I hope to God that he doesn’t decide to break his promise over this.’ Because you could. And someday, you might.” He laughed. “Fuck, for all I know you have already. How would I check?”

“There’s no alternative,” Robb said, with a clipped lilt that announced what he really wanted to be doing was strangling Jaime, but circumstances and civility demanded that he stand here and explain matters to this patent simpleton instead. “I told you already. You trust me or you don’t, and if you don’t, I don’t know where we go from there.”

“We don’t.” Two syllables, the twin clicks of a safety coming off a gun.

I think that was the first time Robb realized the danger he was in. Slowly, with long, unhurried steps, Jaime closed the distance between them. Robb didn’t move. Where could he have gone? Left, and Jaime could block his path to the trail; right, and it was the same story. Back, and there was nothing but the cliff face.

I was torn between flight in one direction and another. I thought frantically of how quickly I could cross the clearing, and if Jaime would hear me coming, and how I could soonest incapacitate him — a blow to the head? The neck? Could I knock him down, and hold him until Robb got away? What then? Could I get him to the cliff face—? But I veered away nauseously from that train of thought.

While I dithered, Jaime stepped face to face with Robb. There was a bristling electricity to the smaller man, one that I had not noticed before and could not possibly understand how I missed. He moved with the arrogance of a man with everything to lose and the danger of a man with nothing. He moved like he was furious, and he always had been furious, and perhaps always would be furious. Jaime was fire and brimstone and wrath, all wrath, full of an anger that could burn the world to dust and still hunger for something to break. His pride was a lake of kerosene, and Robb and I were both watching the match fall.

“I am sorry about this, old boy,” said Jaime, with a terrible softness. “But you know the things we do for love.”

Robb’s eyes slid away, and he gazed into the middle distance. By then he knew what was coming, although I, stupid and slow, was yet to realize. I wondered what he thought. I would always wonder what he thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said. To whom was he apologizing? To me? To Jaime? Or to someone who was not there — his parents, perhaps, or to Arya, Sansa, and Bran, who even now slept soundly in their beds?

Then Jaime stepped forward and shoved him off the cliff.

He floated above the gap for a moment, his arms spread and reaching for some impossible handhold in the air before him. His fingers stretched towards me. But within an instant, gravity took him, and he fell.

I stifled a cry of horror. Some mangled noise must have escaped my throat anyway, for Jaime’s head snapped around, eyes scanning the vague area where I hid.

A raw wave of white noise swallowed my mind. It left nothing except for those base survival instincts which compose all animals: fight and flee. So I ran, tearing at branches, feet scrambling down the uneven ground, until I could hear nothing but the thunder of my own coward’s heart.


End file.
